KU baseball's Dan Fitzgerald shares team message after recent losses

LAWRENCE — There was nothing Dan Fitzgerald could do other than react to the reality of being swept at home by West Virginia.

Fitzgerald, Kansas baseball’s head coach, praised how well the Mountaineers played in this three-game, Big 12 Conference series in Lawrence. In every aspect, he explained, from offense to defense to pitching to base running, WVU outplayed KU that weekend. It pushed the Jayhawks into a four-game losing streak, and Monday would see them drop from No. 9 in the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll to No. 17.

As much as there was a pivot to talking about how KU (37-15, 20-7 in Big 12) would still be going into its final conference series doing well overall in conference play, the tough weekend loomed large. As much as Kansas is still in first place over West Virginia by a game in the Big 12 standings, ahead of a three-game road series at BYU that runs Thursday through Saturday, the margin for error has tightened. And the message Fitzgerald delivered to his team after the WVU series addressed that.

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“Didn’t play great, and that sometimes winning can disguise and camouflage things that need to be addressed,” Fitzgerald explained. “And so, we’ve been addressing things throughout our multiple long win streaks, and I think sometimes it takes weekends like this, unfortunately. My dad used to talk about learning the hard way, and you don’t always have to learn the hard way, and I think, unfortunately, sometimes you do. And so, it’s just a message of, hey, we’ve got a lot on the line, a lot to play for, and that we care at an incredibly high level. We put ourselves in an amazing spot and we’ve got a great team, and it’s a little bit of a gut check.”

Fitzgerald added he told the team that the only way through something like this, this dip in results, is to work their way through it. Adversity is part of the game, and he knows it’s on his coaching staff to help lead this group back to where it had been playing. He also thinks his players are having those productive conversations, which may be difficult at the same time, by themselves as well.

Kansas came into this past weekend as a team poised to host an NCAA regional this postseason, but after being swept, that potential has lessened. There was already pressure on the Jayhawks to live up to the success they’ve enjoyed this spring, and now they’re being hit with the pressure of not letting a difficult situation this late in the season become worse. If KU doesn’t rebound from this, it could lose out on winning a Big 12 regular season title and hosting an NCAA regional.