photo by: Kansas Athletics

The Kansas baseball team huddles with head coach Dan Fitzgerald at a fall game against Bradley on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Lawrence.

The Kansas baseball team has 29 newcomers on its roster ahead of the 2026 season.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Jayhawks had 27 last year, and managed to mold that entirely new group into one that produced the best season in the program’s recent history and earned a trip to the postseason.

“I think one, it proves you can do it,” head coach Dan Fitzgerald told the Journal-World in a recent interview. “You have the confidence to know you can do it. And then two, it gives you a road map for (how) you can’t miss on the character — the integrity, character, teammate, piece has to be there, otherwise it doesn’t work. So it really focuses your efforts on a couple key pieces of who they are as people.”

With those traits in mind, the KU staff reloaded after losing some of the most pivotal pieces of Fitzgerald’s program rebuild to graduation, plus a variety of other critical contributors to the draft and the transfer portal. The players they brought in come from the usual variety of sources that characterize recent KU baseball rosters: a few are freshmen, some are mid-major transfers, but the vast majority are the junior-college players that have comprised three consecutive top-ranked JUCO classes for the Jayhawks.

Fitzgerald said that by reconstructing teams in this way on a regular basis, KU has learned how to expedite the development of its team culture — “way more of a microwave approach than a crockpot, if that makes sense.”

“I think the entire staff, I think I speak for all of us in that we’re pretty relentless and hard-headed when it comes to the really key pieces of the program,” he said.

Beyond those, he lets the players take agency. For example: “We have never told the guys what to wear at practice, and somehow they all end up wearing the same color every day. I don’t know how they do it. I think they must just on their text thread say we’re wearing crimson, blue, black or gray, I don’t know, but we don’t — if we’re going to slide that day, we wear pants. Otherwise they (do) whatever. So we’ve tried to give some of that stuff off, to let them own it.”

The attitude in KU’s dugout — the competitive energy Fitzgerald saw there — turned out to be the single thing with which he was most pleased as the Jayhawks hosted Bradley for an 18-inning fall scrimmage at Hoglund Ballpark on Oct. 11.

“I think what’s different, what’s really unique about this group is that (Brady) Ballinger and (Dariel) Osoria and (Max) Soliz are the three returning hitters, and they’re also three of the top performers, and all three of them are also really comfortable around me,” Fitzgerald said.

That has enabled their new teammates, he said, to “see this as, man, I’m a part of this process with with Coach (Tyler) Hancock and Coach Fitz. And so I think our hitters have really been freed up to (think), hey, my job is just to compete here.”

It’s largely the same on the pitching side with Dominic Voegele and Kannon Carr setting the standard for the rest: “I think they’re freed up to be themselves for the most part. But very clearly, it’s a competitive group, which, if you look at kind of our pyramid of recruiting in terms of what we value, that competitive piece is one of the foundational blocks.”

During the Bradley scrimmage, the on-field results matched the off-field enthusiasm. Fitzgerald said he was pleased with KU’s “flawless” defense, even as players rotated through a variety of positions, and that the Jayhawks were able to string together runs with base hits, walks and hit-by-pitches as the wind was blowing in. The pitching was mostly successful outside of “a couple innings where it got away from our guys a little bit, where we would have probably gone to the pen earlier than we did, but we only had to take one guy out.”

Now Kansas State is coming to town on Friday, providing another external challenge for the Jayhawks at this point in the offseason.

That’s a welcome development for a team within which the intrasquad interactions have become somewhat abstracted from reality.

“Kannon Carr punched out Max Soliz on a slider two weeks ago,” Fitzgerald said. “A week after that, Max Soliz hit a home run off a slider in the exact same count. It’s like, well, Kannon would be a fool to not try to punch Max out the same way, and Max would be a fool to not be sitting on the pitch.”

This issue of what can only be described as metagaming goes for the coaches too.

“Coach (Brandon) Scott and I know each other so well, it’s hard to put any signs on,” Fitzgerald said. “One, our players all know our signs, so you have to, like, kind of sneak around and give signs when people aren’t looking. And then Coach Scott knows every time I’m going to steal. I know every time he’s going to pitch out. I know when he’s going to call breaking balls.

“It’s just so predictable. So I think playing someone else gives you another set of bodies to compete against that isn’t predictable.”

When those bodies are wearing purple jerseys — and it’s part of a big Sunflower Showdown weekend that also includes volleyball at Allen Fieldhouse on Friday and football at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium — it adds another element, even in the low-stakes fall environment.

“Part of transitioning to a different level is feeling the intensity at that level and being comfortable with it, and nothing does that more than a rivalry,” Fitzgerald said. “I think Coach (Pete) Hughes would probably say the same thing. It’s a fall game. We’re trying to get questions answered. I don’t think anyone’s putting too much stock in the outcome of a fall game, but I do think tapping the competitive juices of your team collectively is really important, so it’ll be fun.”

First pitch on Friday is set for 3 p.m. at Hoglund Ballpark.