College baseball Transfer Portal opens with 1,400 entries

By Chris Marler

The NCAA Transfer portal is officially open. Again.

This time it’s the baseball window, and it opened on Monday, June 1. It will remain open for the next 30 days. The flood of prized entrants hasn’t been as crazy as basketball or football, but the number has been just as high.

By the numbers

According to D1Baseball, 1,400 players entered their name in the portal on day one. That number is only expected to rise as more team’s season’s come to an end after regionals and super regionals. That number is higher than what we saw in the first 24 hours of the basketball portal window, but is significantly less than what we saw in football when over 2,000 players entered within the first day. That’s especially surprising since there are 365 Division I baseball teams.

Just 23 players have announced their new home on the first day. Four of those have oddly enough been announced to teams still in the NCAA tournament (Southern Cal 1, UNC 3).

Keeping it local

LSU has done a tremendous job at luring in top end talent from the portal under Jay Johnson with guys like Anthony Eyanson and Paul Skenes. Last year’s haul never seemed to pan out, and the Tigers will hopefully have better luck in 2026, despite Johnson publicly saying he wants to build most of the core of the 2027 team from the current roster. LSU doesn’t need to go shopping for much, and it doesn’t appear Johnson intends to do so. The plan for this offseason is to find power from the current roster and go get athletes and defensive players from the portal.

Hunt Palmer wrote about some of their targets.

With 12 Division I baseball programs in the state, here’s a look at how many players have entered from each D1 school in the state of Louisiana, so far.

Grambling: 1

Louisiana Tech: 4

Louisiana: 2

LSU: 5

McNeese State: 4

Nicholls: 9

Northwestern State: 5

Southern: 0

Southeastern: 1

Tulane: 6

UL Monroe: 5

UNO: 11

Tracking trends

It’s no surprise that the majority of players in the portal are underclassmen. Freshman and sophomores make up just over 50 percent of the total portal entrants. What is surprising is the volume of entrants at one specific position, pitching. Through 24 hours, 669 pitchers entered the portal making up 47.8 percent of the current class. That doesn’t even include the 12 two-way plates that have also entered.

Here’s a look at how many players have entered by class.

Freshman: 329 (23.5 percent)

Sophomores: 373 (26.6 percent)

Juniors: 529 (37.8 percent)

Seniors: 155 (11.1 percent)

Grad Transfer: 14 (1 percent)

SEC team totals

The SEC, as a whole, saw 49 players enter the portal on day one. Nearly half of those came from bottom dwellers, South Carolina and Missouri. No one else in the league has seen more than five players enter as of yet.

LSU currently has five players with their name in, and more expected to come. These numbers should also change drastically and probably very soon with seven SEC teams still in the NCAA Tournament as well as three teams getting bounced out of the tournament on Monday.

Here’s a look at how many players from each team have entered so far.

Alabama: 0

Arkansas: 2

Auburn: 0

Florida: 3

Georgia: 0

Kentucky: 4

LSU: 5

Mississippi State: 1

Missouri: 9

Oklahoma: 2

Ole Miss: 1