photo by: Emma Crouch/Kansas Athletics

Kansas head coach Dan Fitzgerald during practice at Hoglund Ballpark in Lawrence, on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024.

Kansas baseball coach Dan Fitzgerald has said that the baseball world took notice of his program’s strong showing in the Big 12 tournament last May, and of the slew of Jayhawks selected in the MLB Draft following the season.

At first it was difficult for Fitzgerald himself to reflect on the season in quite the same fashion, after the way KU had given up its lead over conference champion Oklahoma with a trip to the league title game on the line on May 24. But he said his staff could examine the exact scenario in which KU lost to OU to inform its future roster building.

“You get the nine outs and you play for a Big 12 title,” Fitzgerald said. “Now what are those pieces that get those nine outs at the end — when (then-ace Hunter) Cranton’s already pitched, when some of those guys have already gone? We addressed a ton of that with just depth.”

Some of the offseason depth-building came against Fitzgerald’s will, as the draft had a much greater effect on his roster than he had expected. KU had six players get selected and sign with professional teams and two more ink contracts as free agents. Among that group of eight departures, six players had additional collegiate eligibility they could have used.

Instead, Fitzgerald and his staff had to embark on an alternative roster-building plan and restock the cupboard late in the summer with some off-the-radar transfers. The result is a 2025 roster with nearly twice as many newcomers as returners.

“It’s been awesome just meeting new guys from all over the country and all over the world,” veteran infielder Michael Brooks told the Journal-World. “There wasn’t really any negativity in the locker room when all these new people (came) on, but honestly just getting to know each other has been awesome.”

The veterans like Brooks — the players who have been with Fitzgerald since his arrival prior to the 2023 season — therefore have an even more pivotal role to play than usual in perpetuating the team culture that has aided KU’s year-over-year improvement (in 2024, at 31-23, KU earned its most overall wins since 2019 and matched its highest conference win total in program history).

“We’ve got a handful of guys that have been with us since the beginning,” Fitzgerald said, “and I think that impact on just how we practice, how we go about things, I think those cultural things were really reassuring that they’re rock solid.”

In the field, that starts with the likes of Brooks, a fifth-year senior.

“Last year, towards the end of the year, my oldest son asked me the one guy that we couldn’t lose, and I said Michael Brooks,” Fitzgerald recalled in a recent video on KU’s social media. “I said he’s the one guy in this lineup that he fills so many roles — and then a week later he’s got a broken hand.”

photo by: Bailey Thompson/Kansas Athletics

Kansas infielder Michael Brooks makes a throw during a fall exhibition game against SIUE at Hoglund Ballpark on Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024.

That injury, which caused Brooks to miss the last month of the 2024 season, is, to hear Fitzgerald tell it, the only reason Brooks is back for another year instead of playing professionally, because he could have been another draftee.

“Obviously everybody wants to go and play professional baseball, and getting hurt and having surgery doesn’t help that,” Brooks said. “Yeah, I mean, (you) just have to stay positive about everything. Everything happens for a reason, like I said, and just happy to be back here.”

Besides being a strong bat, Brooks is the kind of defender Fitzgerald wants the ball hit to on every play. Last season that meant moving him between third base and second base. This year it meant a fall in which he largely played shortstop.

Brooks sees shortstop as the “captain of the field,” but otherwise it’s not too much of a change for him to play there.

“I played short all of high school,” he said. “I’ve played it in scrimmages since I’ve been here. I think one of the things that Fitz does well is he moves everybody around at every position. And I think that’s great because I think that all infielders need to be able to play every position.”

Fitzgerald has said he expects some combination of Brooks, another returnee who had an injury-marred 2024 in Chase Diggins, St. Cloud State transfer Sawyer Smith and Minnesota transfer Brady Counsell to occupy the left side of the infield.

“For the most part, I think they’ve done a terrific job,” Brooks said. “They know a lot of the game and this is going to be a really good infield for us this year.”

The outfield features some returning starting options in Mike Koszewski and Ty Wisdom, along with a distinguished senior transfer from East Tennessee State in Tommy Barth.

“Coming from D-I experience at ETSU, I think he played really good in the fall,” Brooks said, “and I think he’s going to be a really good addition to our outfield this year.”

The recipient of some of Fitzgerald’s most effusive praise, however, is Derek Cerda, a junior from the Dominican Republic who joins KU from Western Oklahoma State College (along with another possible contributor, Dariel Osoria).

“Derek Cerda will play center field on every team he plays on moving forward,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ve coached some really good ones in center field, and he’s right up there at the top.”

At the plate, meanwhile, Fitzgerald said Cerda “didn’t drive the ball like he’s capable of (in the fall), but just was so amazing and so consistent.” KU’s ace Dominic Voegele said Cerda and Counsell have given him the most trouble in practice.

Behind the plate is another site of significant change, with tournament hero Jake English graduating and Ben Hartl not only reaching the pros but going to AAA by the end of the 2024 season. Freshman Xander Schmitt and transfer Ian Francis were early additions, but junior transfer Max Soliz Jr. is “going to make a big splash,” Fitzgerald said.

Soliz is a late-July addition at catcher who did not play during the 2024 college baseball season but impressed over the summer at the Northwoods League.

“You don’t see catchers as tall as Max (6-foot-5),” Fitzgerald said. “Max is a monster. He actually profile-wise, size-wise, is like a Joe Mauer-type guy. For being as long as he is, he has really good hands and keeps the ball in the strike zone, and really improved as the fall went on.”

The headliner above anyone else on KU’s 2025 roster is Voegele, a reigning Big 12 freshman of the year and newly minted preseason pitcher of the year and All-American.

“It’s pretty cool, but I mean, it’s all preseason stuff,” Voegele told the Journal-World. “So just got to go out there and do the real thing during the season.”

photo by: Bailey Thompson/Kansas Athletics

Kansas pitcher Dominic Voegele gets ready to throw during a fall exhibition game against SIUE at Hoglund Ballpark on Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024.

Only a sophomore, Voegele is “the most mellow dude in the world,” Fitzgerald says, but his talent does plenty of talking, and he’ll be one of the league’s most feared top-end starters.

“His velo’s up a little bit, physically he looks great,” Fitzgerald said. “Yeah, I wish they were all like him. He’s a special one.”

In the offseason, Voegele has worked on building muscle and velocity, but the biggest move of the offseason for him has been his ongoing effort to add a fourth pitch, a changeup, to his repertoire. He said it would help against left-handed hitters, and he’s found a grip he likes with a lot of trial and error.

“If I can get a changeup, it’d probably be the biggest jump I’ve ever taken with my baseball career, because all the pitches that I have now, I’ve had them all since the beginning of pitching,” Voegele said.

In terms of other options on the mound, Fitzgerald has previously mentioned another sophomore, Cooper Moore, as a strong starting candidate, after the Bixby, Oklahoma, native tallied a 4.05 ERA in 29 appearances as a reliever in 2024. Redshirt junior Patrick Steitz was on a tear as KU’s Sunday starter last season before undergoing Tommy John surgery in April.

“He’s been making great strides,” Brooks said. “Honestly, he’s just started throwing again, and I’m just excited to see what he could do to finish out a season.”

The Jayhawks have Thaniel Trumper, one of the Big 12’s most frequently deployed relievers in 2023, back on the roster after he took a medical redshirt in 2024.

Perhaps in response to the way that Oklahoma game ended, the relief portion of the pitching staff got loaded up with transfer talent from the four-year level over the summer, in addition to a variety of other JUCO arms who were already slated to join the team.

The result is a staff that now includes Jake Cubbler (USC Upstate), Eric Lin (South Alabama), Connor Maggi (Gardner-Webb) and Malakai Vetock (Creighton), plus JUCO players expected to contribute in the back end of the bullpen early on like Alex Breckheimer, Robbie Knowles and Dalton Smith — which isn’t even close to all the newcomers available, as Fitzgerald and pitching coach Brandon Scott have a lot of options to sort through.

As the Jayhawks look to reach their first NCAA Tournament since 2014, they will hope to start their nonconference schedule strong following some missteps at the beginning of last season. Fitzgerald explained the significance of opponent record — and opponents’ strength of schedule — in nonconference planning.

“You really want to play people that win a ton of games,” he said. “So you try to play some teams that are going to do really well. Basically you want to sweep them and you want them to go undefeated the rest of the way. And so there’s a trickiness to some of the nonconference games of who’s going to be really good in their conference — and is it a warm-weather state so we can make sure we’re going to play?”

KU opens the year with a four-game series at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi beginning Feb. 14. Its first home games are against Omaha at the end of February, and Big 12 play starts at home against Baylor on March 14. The Jayhawks were picked to finish ninth in the 14-team league.

“We lost a couple of our cornerstone pieces of the Big 12, but adding Arizona, Utah, Arizona State, those are also very pristine programs, especially for the baseball side,” Brooks said. “I think that helps expand the country, or the wide spread of the Big 12 across the country, but yeah, I’m excited. There’s a lot of really good competition this year.”