March 19. It is a date that Travis Bazzana will always remember and because of one moment in particular — even if he can’t actually remember much about the moment itself.
What he can remember is the feeling, of time standing still, of soaking up every last second and just being present, in that moment — one that some said would never happen.
There was still a game to be won or lost. But it felt like he had already won. It felt like they had won.
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Why Bazzana is set up to succeed in MLB | 04:48
That day they were rivals, Bazzana playing for Oregon State and childhood friend Jimmy Nati for Stanford.
For years though they had been taking different paths to the same destination. On that Sunday afternoon, it happened to be Klein Field at Sunken Diamond — the home to Stanford Baseball.
“It’s so special to me,” Bazzana told foxsports.com.au of that game between OSU and Stanford and that moment, when Nati reached second base and the pair shared a hug that was years in the making.
They had shared so much more along the way too. They shared the same goal of playing Division I baseball in the United States and also the same sceptics, who told them the pathway was not there.
“It comes back to conversations I had with family and mentors and people like Jimmy when I was in high school,” added Bazzana.
“(Where) it was like, I want to change the narrative in Australian baseball and make the sport grow and provide belief for the kids back home that they can go do great things in the sport in America and there’s no reason for them to not believe in themselves.”
Bazzana always believed in the vision that he created for himself. That one day he would be playing on the same college baseball field as Nati, starting to carve out that pathway they were told was not there. That day came on March 19.
“I remember I got on the second base and I gave him a little hug,” Nati told foxsports.com.au.
“We just kind of took in a moment, got to see the crowd and I was like, ‘Damn bro, this is happening’. It’s just like everything we both had dreamed of.”
“I was so caught up in that moment and that feeling with him,” added Bazzana.
“He’s been through this journey with me the whole time and I was so lost in that moment that I didn’t even know what was kind of going on in my surroundings.”
Bazzana knew what it meant though. Knew this was just the start of what he and Nati had envisioned for themselves, even if others “tried to put a ceiling on where you can go”, as he put it.
To Bazzana, there was no ceiling — no limit to what he was capable of provided he put in the work.
That ceiling ended up being worth millions, with Bazzana taken by the Cleveland Guardians with the first overall pick in Monday’s Major League Baseball (MLB) Draft.
It comes after a standout career at Oregon State, where the Australian became the program’s all-time leader in home runs, stolen bases, runs scored, doubles, hits and walks.
Bazzana’s Beavers career in numbers (All program records)
Career hits: 251
Home runs: 45
Doubles: 52
Walks: 180
Runs: 220
Stolen bases: 66
Total bases: 460
“Travis Bazzana is a name that everyone in American sports knows,” Andrew Riddell, National Player Development Manager at Baseball Australia, told foxsports.com.au.
“And he is going to be a name that everyone in Australia should know.”
But for Bazzana, it isn’t just about putting his name in the lights. Far from it. In fact, it’s as if everytime he steps to the plate he has the Australian flag draped on his back.
With every home run hit and base stolen, Bazzana is helping put Australian baseball on the map. And at just 21 years old, he’s only just getting started.
In this two-part series, foxsports.com.au chronicles Bazzana’s rise and the unconventional path he took to realising his MLB dream.
THE START OF A DREAM…AND CRITICS THAT FUELLED HIS FIRE
Nati still remembers the first time he met Bazzana. It’d be hard not to considering what happened.
As was the case when Oregon State and Stanford played earlier this year, Nati and Bazzana were rivals on different teams. Except this time around they didn’t know each other.
It wasn’t the best of first impressions either.
Bazzana, who was playing for the Ku-ring-gai Stealers, stepped up to the plate while Nati lined up at shortstop for the Greenway Giants.
All that Nati remembers next is a ball flying directly at him.
“It missed my glove and sloped me in the face,” he laughs.
“I was like, ‘Damn, I don’t know if I like this kid’.”
Which is funny because, over a decade later, that same kid is now Nati’s “number one role model” and there’s far more than just a line drive to the face that brought these two together.
Starting, quite simply, with the fact they played baseball.
It may not seem like much, but considering Bazzana also played cricket, basketball, rugby and football it meant something that he stuck with baseball.
Particularly when you consider Bazzana played cricket at representative level, even captaining Turramurra High School to a state championship at one point.
“Being a minority sport in Australia the kind of athletes we normally get aren’t the best athletes for the country in the age group,” Riddell explained.
“They normally go to AFL, soccer, basketball, NRL … so we kind of get the athletes that don’t do a mainstream sport from Australia.
“We’re obviously really lucky with Travis that he decided to play baseball and left cricket because we were able to get an athlete of his calibre. Then there’s the mental side of things and the work ethic and things like that that have enabled him to get to where he is.
“He’s obviously self-driven.”
So was Nati. The two were from the same representative region and that meant they saw a whole lot more of each other, sometimes as opponents and other times as teammates.
They also lived a short drive away too, which meant training “pretty much every day”.
“Or as much as we could,” added Nati.
And for Bazzana, no minute was wasted — not even when he was only 13 years old and attending a player evaluation tour held by NxtGen Baseball, the performance company founded and run by Ryan Rowland-Smith.
Here Bazzana was, the only kid in sight with a pen and pad in hand, writing down every little note and every little detail while already setting himself goals. But not just for the year coming.
“For the next two years, the next 10 years,” Rowland-Smith, a former Australian Major League pitcher, told foxsports.com.au.
“It was insane. I’ve never seen anything like it for a kid that age.”
But that’s the thing about Bazzana. He has always seemed to have a grasp of the game and specifically the way his mind works that was well beyond his years.
“When you have conversations with him it’s like speaking to a 30-year-old and someone that has been around it for a long time,” as Riddell put it.
Bazzana has been around the game for a long time. Since he was three years old, to be exact, when he first starting swinging and he hasn’t stopped since, as if the bat became an extension of his hands.
It just fit. It just felt right. And it was what he wanted to do the rest of his life.
Although it wasn’t always a bat he was holding. At one stage of his childhood it was a two-litre bottle of coke his dad used to create a device that Bazzana played with to learn how to bunt as a kid.
Nights swinging away in the family living room would soon become nights perfecting his craft in the local cages at Golden Jubilee Field again with dad Gary, who won a national baseball title with Queensland’s Under 18s team in 1985.
“They’d stay for half an hour for extra hitting tee work in the cages multiple nights a week,” Ben Matthews told foxsports.com.au.
“He got a lot of that from Gary, pushing him to better at a young age.”
Matthews coached Bazzana in five of the six consecutive premiership winning teams he played in since starting up in tee-ball.
One year, when he was assistant coach of Bazzana’s Little League team, Matthews’ mother had to write a letter in to the America Little League headquarters.
Why exactly? Well, it turns out Bazzana was just that good, so good that he was ready to play with kids two years ahead of him. But they needed permission first.
“So as a 10 year old, Trav was playing with 12-and-a-half-year-olds,” Matthews said.
“He’s always just been a weapon.”
But in other ways, he was also just like every other kid with a seemingly endless supply of energy, just in need of something to put all of that energy into. He found it in baseball.
“It’s funny I think because as a kid Travis was a bit of a little s***,” Matthews laughed.
“He was a bit of a wildcard, bundle of energy, kind of hard to contain him sometimes and I think it was probably his commitment he made to baseball and wanting to go to college that honestly levelled him out and into a man as well.”
That also came from playing for the Sydney Blue Sox in the Australian Baseball League where Bazzana, despite still being in high school, was already competing in first grade against grown men.
For Bazzana, the at-bats weren’t always there and he largely had to wait until the Covid-19 impacted 2020-21 season to see more opportunities with the American imports unavailable.
But Bazzana didn’t need to be on the field to be learning something. Every moment spent around former big leaguers like Gift Ngoepe and Andy Burns was an opportunity for growth.
“I could see the guys that have made the Major Leagues like Gift Ngoepe and Andy Burns and these people that I played with and then I could see the guys that had kind of flailed out and not made it and that’s no disrespect to them, but I was able to understand more about the successful ones,” he said.
Bazzana had another teammate, Ty’Relle Harris, who was drafted in the 19th round by the Atlanta Braves in 2009 and later went on to pitch in AAA for the Chicago Cubs affiliate the Iowa Cubs.
“He wasn’t a big leaguer,” Bazzana said.
“But he was a mentor in the sense that he would show up early and ask the young guys to show up early and put in the work in the weight room with him and he’d help us with extra batting practice and extra fielding practice and just wanted the best for us.
“He constantly mentioned, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the first Australian first rounder. You’re going be a major leaguer. You’ve just got to believe and put the work in’… and he was kind of the only guy that was really relatable in terms of how high I set my ceiling and how great I wanted to be.
“He was the one guy when I was in the ABL that really believed in me and helped me through that.”
Others didn’t share that same belief. In fact, there was plenty of talk of a different kind in and around the locker room — the kind that Bazzana said he used as “fuel” to get to where he is now.
“I’d say a lot of the learning experience in that time was sort of using the fuel of people’s doubt in that environment as fuel to motivate me to be where I am today,” Bazzana added.
“I knew that guys in the locker room in the ABL were like, ‘How was Bazzana going to Oregon State and how was Bazzana getting game time over me?’ There was definitely a lot of doubt in that environment being the youngest in the locker room or one of the youngest.
“I’d kind of heard that and just learned to use it as fuel. I think it can make or break some guys when your older peers are sort of doubting your ability.”
It would have been easy to let the words consume him. To stop being a dreamer and start being a realist. To accept the ceiling that had been placed on where he could go and who he could be.
But the point of having a dream is that you continue to believe anything is possible, even if you are continually told otherwise. Sometimes, being told otherwise only makes that belief even stronger.
That, according to Riddell, is now Bazzana’s “driving force every day”.
“He has bigger goals than probably anyone has ever set leaving here that they’ve really vocalised,” Riddell said.
“Obviously everyone wants to play in the big leagues, they want to sign and they want to make millions of dollars. But they don’t really vocalise that publicly around how big their goals are.
“… Travis probably copped a lot of crap to be honest when he was coming through the juniors from other people around how vocal he was about what he wants to do in baseball because everybody was like, ‘That’s not realistic, you can’t really do that’. He’s proved them all wrong.”
The kind of confidence Bazzana has, the unwavering self-belief that took him to the top of draft boards and put his name on the map in America, is often celebrated over in the States.
In fact, it’s the attitude that you need to have to be successful. But back home, things were different.
“I think sometimes in Australia there’s that sort of tall poppy syndrome,” Bazzana said.
“As soon as I started to voice and pursue those kind of higher expectations and goals for myself, a lot of people just think you’re cocky and ignorant to reality and they want to be like, ‘Hey mate, don’t get ahead of yourself… or you need to have lots of fallbacks and understand that it’s really, really tough and most people can’t do it’.
“It’s all ‘You can’t, you can’t, you can’t’… and I just had some good mental moments and just researched and delved into it myself from a young age to where I was like, ‘No. If I really want to get where I want to go I have to think bigger and aim higher and then work really, really hard to get those things’ and kind of disregard the people trying to kind of put a ceiling on where you can go.
“Then you combine that with I guess the track record of Australian baseball at the time I was coming through. There wasn’t many position players or infielders like me making it at the highest level or going to Power Five, Division I baseball programs and so everyone sort of thinks it’s not possible and (for) the coaches that have been there, done that it’s like, ‘If I couldn’t do it, how can this kid do it?’ and so their words are limiting.”
Instead, Bazzana asked himself three simple words. Why not me?
“I sort of had to get away from what other people kind of said I could do and just go, ‘Alright, I’m going to make my own path, I’m going to make my own expectations and just go out and pursue that’, understanding that if some kid from Santo Domingo or Dominican Republic or Florida in the USA can go out and be a great player at Division I level and then become a high draft pick, like why can’t I?” he said.
“I have resources, I have a good family and people around me. I always kind of had the mindset of why not me?”
Why not me? Why couldn’t he be the first Australian taken in the opening round of the MLB draft?
Why couldn’t he be MVP of the West Coast League, the best player of his team as a freshman, an all-American, winner of the Golden Spikes and a first-rounder like he would so confidently tell Nati?
Well, firstly, the pathway for most Australian prospects didn’t exactly set up Bazzana for that kind of success. So, he went in a completely different direction. It meant turning down nearly six figures.
That ended up parlaying into millions at Monday’s draft.
HOW BAZZANA TOOK THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED
When he isn’t on the field or working on his swing in the cages, chances are Bazzana is using his spare time trying to discover another way to get an edge on the competition.
Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be strictly related to baseball. Bazzana, a psychology major, is obsessed with the intricacies of the human mind.
That means that when he doesn’t have a baseball in hand often you’ll find him with a book instead and sometimes it may not even be his own.
You see, Bazzana and his coach at Oregon State, Mitch Canham, had got into the habit of swapping books.
For example, at one point last year Canham was reading the Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman while Bazzana had Adam Grant’s Think Again.
Then they found something else to read and few weeks after that they swapped over, or maybe even sooner if Bazzana has anything to do with it.
“He even asked me, ‘Well how fast do you read?’” Camhan told foxsports.com.au.
“I try to get 10-15 pages in a day and he’s just making sure that he’s, ‘Hey, I’m going to finish my book, you hurry up and finish your book too so I can get into the next one as well’.
“… I told him to make sure he takes a lot of notes in it in the margins so that I can see which parts of the book really caught his attention and I can learn from those as well.”
All of this is to say that Bazzana is constantly looking for the next page to turn — and that extends to everything he does on the field, where the Australian has an analytic mind like few others his age.
It was what led a 15-year-old Bazzana to turn down nearly six figures, understanding through his own research of other players that he was worth more. That he could be more than that.
“I wasn’t very highly valued by pro scouts in Australia or the international scouting market,” Bazzana said.
“I didn’t think that people understood the growth I was capable of and they kind of just, I felt like they weren’t seeing what I saw in myself.
“So my thought process as soon as I thought college was going to be the route was what college is going to allow me to do is put myself up against a playing field that gets scouted consistently and the performance will do the talking.
“In Australia as a high schooler, these scouts would see me hit batting practice once a year and make an evaluation on me… the American kids play 40 to 80 games and the scouts make an evaluation based on that plus they can see the numbers of everything you’ve done.
“So my thing was like, ‘I think I’m better than my value back home as a 16 year old and how can I prove that?’ Well, I can get into a competition where I’m just competing against my peers and if I play better than them my value is going to show through.”
And that is exactly what happened. But first, Bazzana needed to find someone else who believed in his vision – someone who had the contacts, knowledge and passion to make his dream a reality.
He discovered that with NxtGen Baseball and Rowland-Smith, who founded the performance company with the aim of giving the next generation of Australian baseball talent the platform and opportunities that he never had.
Namely, more variety in the kind of pathways that were available.
Too often the norm was signing a professional contract at a young age with the hope of making it, only to come up against players who had grown up facing the top level of competition in America.
The result? After just a few years, some of the country’s most promising young prospects could find themselves back in Australia, no longer with a contract and, potentially, lost to the sport.
“One thing that was really missing and one thing I wish I had was a chance to play college baseball because all these teammates I’ve had at the highest level talk about how crucial and how that changed their lives,” Rowland-Smith said.
Rowland-Smith was able to carve out a professional baseball career that spanned 17 years and several different countries, including the United States, where he played five seasons in the MLB.
Having already lived out his dream, Rowland-Smith wanted to help other young aspiring Australian baseball players do the same.
That, in some cases, meant challenging the expectation that doing so started with either playing professional baseball or going to a junior college. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
“Absolutely nothing against junior colleges, I’ve sent a lot of kids over to junior colleges,” Rowland-Smith said.
“But man these kids are good enough to play at these really good four-year schools … I’ve been around players have turned down millions of dollars to go to college instead of getting drafted out of high school and so that was a big push.”
Not that Bazzana needed convincing anyway. He’d already convinced himself long before then that he wouldn’t just settle for what was expected.
That he, like Rowland-Smith, could carve out his own path. Nati too.
It’s what brought them together on that Sunday afternoon at Klein Field at Sunken Diamond in the first place and it’s why, despite taking separate journeys there, they have and will continue to be inextricably linked in everything they do.
“Travis kind of understood (it) because he’s baseball savvy and he understands how a lot of this stuff works,” said Rowland-Smith.
And he’s not just saying that. Again, always inquisitive and wanting to find out more, Bazzana had done his homework.
“I believe lots of Australian kids signed (professional deals) between $20,000 and $200,000 most like 90 per cent I think,” Bazzana said when asked about the decision to go down the college route.
“That’s kind of a guesstimate. But most kids are signing right around the six-figure mark. To put that in context, that’s like the 400 or 500th pick in the Major League Draft every year that gets about that much money or the 10th to 20th rounders.
“I figured that, ‘Alright. What does the 10th or 20th rounder out of college look like?’ and I kind of could research that and I’m like, ‘OK, this guy hits 300 as a 21-year-old in college with 10 home runs and he’s the 10th rounder and I’m a 16-year-old high school kid. Why couldn’t I do that as a 21-year-old?’, because then I’d be the exact same value that I got as a 16-year-old. So I was kind of like, ‘Really, I think I can do greater than that and go show someone at college’.”
Just one glimpse into the inner-workings of a mind that never stops. Add in his physical talents and Bazzana was, as Rowland-Smith put it, the “perfect model” for a Division I program.
“Like, it’s just so obvious,” the former Major Leaguer added.
He just needed to put Bazzana on a platform so the rest of the world could see it too.
So, on one visit to the Arizona Fall Classic, Rowland-Smith reached out to good friend and Beavers pitching coach, Rich Dorman, telling him Oregon State had to send people down to look at Bazzana.
“And I mean, good thing they did,” said Rowland-Smith.
“He tore it up and look what he’s become now. It’s pretty amazing.”
Not long after Bazzana was touring the campus on a recruiting visit and then later in the trophy room, surrounded by legendary names like Adley Rutschman, Jacoby Ellsbury, Nick Madrigal and Trevor Larnach — ones he could soon be joining on Oregon State’s MLB first-round selection honour board.
“I’ll never forget it,” Bazzana said.
It was everything he had been working towards. Everything he had been dreaming of. But when the time came for Bazzana to commit to Oregon State, he paused.
What he said next left a lasting impression on Canham.
“I think just from that initial encounter,” the Beavers coach said, “we knew this guy was the real deal.”
THE EARLY SIGNS BAZZANA WAS ‘EXTREMELY SPECIAL’
It would’ve been easy for Bazzana to accept the offer on the spot.
To jump at the opportunity to tell all the people that ever doubted him that he had already made it, not just to a Division I school but to one of the most decorated baseball programs in the country.
But he didn’t – at least, in that moment he didn’t. It wasn’t that he was having second thoughts. It wasn’t like he hadn’t already pictured himself running out to a sea of orange and black at Goss Stadium.
“I really already felt a connection to Oregon State and I really knew deep down that was where I wanted to go,” Bazzana said.
He couldn’t hide it either when offered the chance to become a Beaver.
“He got quite emotional,” added Canham.
“This is something that he had said he’s been wanting his whole life.”
True as that may be and as easy as the decision seemed, Bazzana wanted to do it the right way – even if that meant delaying his dream just that little bit longer.
“The one thing that really impressed each of us was he didn’t get sped up on the process,” Canham said.
“As he’s getting emotional and kind of overwhelmed a little bit and you can see it on his face he paused and said, ‘I wanted this my entire life but I need to make sure that I get home and talk this over with my family’.
“That was the impressive piece for us. Someone who’s wanted to be here, getting offered a tremendous scholarship to be a part of Oregon State baseball. He paused, didn’t get sped up on the situation, went home and discussed it over with his family and then gave us a call and said he’s coming to Oregon State.
“That tells me in the biggest platform that we’re going to play in, the College World Series, playing in front of 40,000 people on national television, he’s not going to get sped up in the moment.”
It was just further confirmation of what Canham had already gathered from his short time touring the Oregon State campus and facilities with Bazzana, that this young kid from Australia was more than just a really good baseball player. He was also a really good person – and that mattered.
“Extremely special”, as Canham described him.
“Obviously we knew from watching him play that the talent is tremendous but it’s also getting to know the human being and that his capabilities are much greater than what anyone ever thinks they’re going to be.
“This guy, in my mind, is not a part of the one per cent he’s a part of the 0.0001 per cent.”
Aussie star to be No.1 MLB draft pick? | 00:16
Bazzana quickly proved it too in the summer before joining Oregon State, setting a new single-season record for batting average while playing for the Corvallis Knights in the West Coast League.
He hit .429 over 189 at-bats, while also leading the WCL in runs scored (46), hits (81), total bases (112) and slugging percentage (.593) on the way to being named the league’s Most Valuable Player.
“He’s clearly one of the most talented young players I’ve been around,” Corvallis Knights coach Brooke Knight told foxsports.com.au.
“We’ve had some pretty good ones like Nick Madrigal or Adley Rutchman and there’s a handful of others (like) Brooks Lee. Comparing him to guys that are that are of similar age, he’s right there with them.”
To anyone who didn’t know Bazzana it would’ve seemed too good to be true, the way this unknown Australian was already finding ways to dominate in a league with some of the most talented young players on the West Coast.
But to Bazzana, none of it was a surprise.
It was everything he had imagined. Everything he thought he was capable of. Everything he had so confidently told his dad before heading over to the States in the first place.
“I was hitting in the cages back at the Ku-ring-gai Stealers field where I grew up playing,” Bazzana said, recalling that conversation he had the week before leaving to play for Corvallis.
“I had a really good training session and my dad asked me, ‘How good do you think you’re going to be in the West Coast League? How do you think you’re going to compare to these guys?’
“I was like, ‘I think I can be the best hitter in the league and be the best player in the league’. And I truly wholeheartedly believed that. But I also didn’t know what I was going to look like because I’d never competed against college kids in America.
“Dad kind of just thought I was talking out of my arse for lack of a better term. I was like, ‘No I truly believe that’. I felt like I’d really put the work in and I believed in where I was at.”
It is the kind of belief you can’t just manufacture, born out of what Bazzana described as an “obsession and passion for the game” which led to hours spent watching YouTube videos of major leaguers or consuming any sort of data that would give him an edge over the rest of the competition.
It was his separator. But Oregon State was something else entirely, yet another test in seeing just how far this little known Sydney native could go.
By this point though Bazzana had another completely different challenge to overcome, one he had not yet faced since arriving in America in the first place – the weight of expectation.
“Oregon State is a perennial contender to go to the World Series or at the very least go deep into the college baseball playoffs,” Joe Freeman, who covers the Beavers for The Oregonian, told foxsports.com.au.
“… Baseball is a big deal in Oregon State. And so when he arrived, he arrived with a lot of attention and kind of hype because he came in as a prominent prospect in baseball circles and then he played for the Corvallis Knights before he stepped foot into a college baseball game.
“And he just crushed. I mean, he was incredible in that league. By doing that, expectations just skyrocketed for him.”
Expectations that Bazzana swiftly lived up to, starting 63 games in his freshman season for the Beavers as the Australian batted .306 with 16 doubles, four triples, six home runs, 44 RBI and 14 stolen bases.
Bazzana’s coming-out party came against Arizona State, with the second baseman hitting a grand slam and driving in eight runs – just one shy of tying the Oregon State record.
Everything seemed to be working out, seemed to be heading in the same direction – to the College World Series and everything Bazzana had dreamed about. Until it wasn’t.
Until Bazzana was instead left in tears, made over the summer to dwell on an empty feeling that coach Canham said at the time would “sting forever”.
There are many sides to Travis Bazzana. The fierce competitor. The willing learner. The master tactician.
In that moment of complete vulnerability, after he went 0-for-4 and left eight runners on base in the 4-3 loss to the Auburn Tigers in the Super Regionals, he showed a completely different side.
He showed how much he cared, how much he wanted to win a national championship and, more than anything else, how much he didn’t want to ever let his teammates down.
“That emotional connection to wanting to win so bad starts with just my recruiting with Oregon State and talking about winning a national championship with Coach Canham and being in the room with those trophies of past,” Bazzana said.
“It started there and then once you get into the environment here and are a part of this culture and build the relationships that are lifelong and you go day in, day out through hard struggle, ups and downs and just training with these guys and build such a close relationship; when you see that end and you feel that end, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is some guys’ last games that they’ll ever play on the baseball field. This is some guys’ last games that they’ll ever play with us’.
“It’s also an expectation of the guys and me to continue this rich history in this program and the want to go out and perform for the great staff that we have. I want nothing more than to bring a championship back to Oregon State again.”
A year on and Bazzana had done all he could to try do just that, setting the Oregon State single-season record for stolen bases (36) and that was just the start of one of the best individual offensive seasons in Beavers history.
Bazzana went on to rank first in runs (75), walks (59) and on-base percentage (.512), second in doubles (20) and hits (83) and fourth in batting average (.379) in the Pac-12 conference.
It still wasn’t enough for Bazzana to bring that championship back to Oregon State as the Beavers again fell short on the road to Omaha, this time at the hands of the LSU Tigers.
But it couldn’t take away from a historic sophomore season for the Australian, who had soared up draft boards and in the process cemented himself as one of college baseball’s best prospects.
In order to truly appreciate magnitude of Bazzana’s achievements though, first you have to take a few steps back.
Back to where it all started. Back to those who came before him. Back to Rutschman, Ellsbury, Madrigal and Larnach.
Back to those same names and many others, forever etched in the minds of Oregon State fans as they are on the honour boards adorning the walls in the same trophy room where Bazzana was first asked to join this program, inspired by and striving to be like those who came before.
“You have to understand, this is a very talented program with a lot of history, especially lately with some very prominent players in its history,” Freeman added.
“It’s a very decorated path and so the things that he’s doing, that carries extra weight that he’s setting records and elevating his status and his name up with some of those legendary players, it really speaks volumes.
“He’s an example coaches will be using for years to come on what it takes to succeed and what you need to do to be a high-level player. I know his teammates love him, his coaches love him, Oregon State baseball fans love him. He’s just a beloved and respected figure in this program.”
But that respect had to be earned and without it, Bazzana wouldn’t have had the chance to continue carving his own path even after playing his first full season at Oregon State.
For most players his age, the natural next step would be to spend the summer playing in a wooden bat league and that was Bazzana’s initial plan.
Then the draft rules changed and with it came an opportunity for Bazzana to do things a little differently. It was a risk. But like with anything else he did, he’d already thought it all through.
THE ‘RARE’ CALL THAT HELPED TAKE BAZZANA TO ANOTHER LEVEL
The initial plan was for Bazzana to play in the Cape Cod League, the premier summer wooden bat baseball league which gives college players the chance to impress MLB scouts and executives.
But then he was no longer eligible to be drafted after his sophomore season, meaning instead of having just the one summer to prepare before the draft Bazzana now had two.
At that stage it was a case of either spending both playing in the Cape or using his first summer to develop his game before then heading to the Cape at the end of his sophomore season, increasing his chances of really making an impression on scouts in the process.
While obviously Bazzana was far removed from the young teenager that attended former Major League pitcher Ryan Rowland-Smith’s camp all those years ago, in some sense he was also still that young, eager kid with a pen and pad in hand, still mapping out his future and still the type to always be thinking one step ahead.
And so, he decided to spend the first summer in Seattle at Driveline working on his swing, hitting against an iPitch machine that threw at game speed from a game distance and with game spin and movement.
“Driveline is the leader in player development, probably in the world, for any non-MLB team that has their own staff,” Andrew Aydt, Bazzana’s hitting trainer at Driveline, told foxsports.com.au.
“… You can come in and go through a full assessment and then we kind of sit down and break down a very detailed individualised training plan for however long they’re going to want to stay on with us.
“In Travis’ case he didn’t really have too many weaknesses, especially for a college player. He was already above average and was looking to increase that level to a pro level while still being in college.
“So we have a lot of guys that come in when they’re in the minor league or already in MLB that didn’t realise they had certain weaknesses until it was exposed in the game and Travis wanted to get ahead of that.”
In the case of Bazzana, most of the time was spent increasing his bat speed, which he was able to by somewhere between seven and eight miles an hour.
“Which is a really massive jump compared to what most guys will obtain in that same amount of time,” Aydt said.
“Some guys will gain a couple miles an hour during that time which is still a lot, that’s more than anyone else will be able to train someone at that rate, and then Travis saw an even bigger jump than that.”
Bazzana also worked on producing a more upright posture in his stance and swing, resulting in a 6.98 degree decrease in side bend that in turn allowed him to flatten out his bat path.
“I remember that was kind of a breakthrough for him when he figured out that posture and his stance that was that was the biggest game changer,” Rowland-Smith, founder of NxtGen Baseball and mentor to Bazzana, said.
Bazzana stayed at Rowland-Smith’s house in Seattle during his time at Driveline, talking every single day about what was going well and, at times, not so well.
Whatever the day’s work, Bazzana — or the “hitting doctor” as Nati likes to call him — would have something on his mind.
And when he puts his mind to something, Bazzana will read and watch and then read some more.
Or, in the case of when he missed out on a representative team back home in Australia, he’ll train and train and then train some more as Rowland-Smith recalled.
“He knew he wanted to get faster and bigger,” the former Major League pitcher said.
“And so he spent an offseason on his own, where this is very rare, and he said, ‘You know what, this is how fast I want to run a 60-yard sprint, this is how hard I want to hit the ball, this is what I need to figure out’. And he just did all that on his own.”
Just another example of the way Bazzana forged his own path and you can add the decision to forego the Cape to that long list.
“I think it’s very rare,” Aydt said.
“Travis is the first player that I’ve heard of that’s been healthy and passed up on the Cape.
“It’s a different situation when guys get down to spring season after a long year and their body is pretty beat up, they might take some time off and need to recover and get their body right but Travis was fully healthy and I’ve never heard of anyone passing up on the Cape Cod League.”
Of course, Bazzana did end up going to the Cape eventually but regardless this was an extra summer that he could have spent raising his draft stock by putting his name out there in front of MLB scouts.
But the Oregon State staff trusted he was making the right decision. The key word here being trust, something that is earned.
Earned by all the hard work Bazzana had put into his game, which first resulted in West Coast League MVP honours and then an impressive freshman season for the Beavers.
“They know that I’m not going to take 10 steps down the wrong path,” Bazzana said.
“I might take two down the wrong path and then fix where I’m going because I’ve built a knowledge base and I’m a good enough self-evaluator to where they trust in the things I’m seeing for myself in the future and the decisions I want to make and the opportunities I want to take up.”
It wasn’t just about doing what was right for his own game. That was part of it. But just as important to Bazzana was his teammates, knowing that any information he gained could be theirs too.
So, he prepared a presentation. Not to help the hitters but the team’s pitchers.
“I literally sat in my living room last summer and he was putting together a PowerPoint presentation to give to his pitchers because he’s so obsessed with the game, he’s a student of the game,” Rowland-Smith said.
“So, he’s putting together a PowerPoint presentation to show what pitches in what count they should be throwing and why, going over all this data.
“It’s insane, so you look at both ends of the spectrum physically and obviously some of the preparation side of things, he’s just next level. I was just blown away.
“I said to (pitching coach) Rich Dorman, ‘You’re going to allow Travis to talk to your pitcher this way?’, and he goes, ‘It was really great, it was amazing information, it’s great’. That’s just how he is.”
But Bazzana wasn’t done there. First came the hour-and-a-half presentation about sliders and induced vertical break. Then it was another to the whole squad on champion habits.
“He didn’t need to do this, right?” Canham said.
Again, it comes back to that one word – trust.
“He’s excited about it because when you prepare a presentation, you have to learn, you have to do research and you have to stand up in front of a group and present, which is building trust in the group and putting yourself out on a limb,” added Canham.
“What if they don’t like it? What if they disagree? But getting up in front of the squad and showing them is, hopefully, other people follow and they want to do presentations as well and share with the group.
“That’s how we learn… I think that was a great time for him to go up and do that, too and then last year to go out and push himself and play in the Cape all summer and really show out on a new level has really helped his case.”
THE ‘ONE-OF-A-KIND’ AUSTRALIAN WHO TOOK THE CAPE BY STORM
Speaking of which, Bazzana headed to the Cape with plenty of hype after a sophomore season that saw him earn five All-America selections while also being named to the All-Tournament teams for the Baton Rouge Regional and Pac-12 Tournament.
In spite of all of that, playing in the Cape was going to be a completely new challenge for Bazzana and for one very simple reason.
In college baseball they use aluminium bats, while in the Cape they’re wooden.
“Obviously in Minor League baseball and Major League baseball they use wooden bats and so a lot of guys smoke the ball or crush the ball in college baseball and it doesn’t translate when they get to the pros,” Freeman said.
In other words, as impressive as Bazzana’s production had been at Oregon State, there was no guarantee he would find the same success in a wood bat league and against some of the best college players in the country.
The team Bazzana was playing for, the Falmouth Commodores, were also 3-10-2 when he showed up.
By the end of the regular season the Commodores had an overall record of 24-18-2, Bazzana had claimed the league’s batting title with a .375 average and was then voted Cape Cod League MVP.
“Being named MVP and winning a batting championship is a really big deal in that league in part because there are so many future Major Leaguers and because there are so many Major League scouts but also because it’s a wood bat league,” Freeman said.
“If you’re facing elite pitching in the Cape Cod league and you produce like that, Major League Baseball scouts want to see that, because that is an indicator of your potential future success so that’s kind of that’s a big deal for sure.”
Falmouth won eight of its last 10 games to qualify for the playoffs in no small part because of Bazzana, who finished the regular season with a 12-game hitting streak that included three home runs.
In what Commodores hitting coach Brett Becker described as his “coming out party”, Bazzana hit the first-ever cycle (a single, double, triple and home run in the same game) in the stat-tracking era for Falmouth in a 6-3 win over the Orleans Firebirds.
“It was kind of from that moment is when he really started to take the league by storm and it’s when people started to really notice him,” Becker told foxsports.com.au.
“I coach third base, so the visiting dugout is usually behind me and hearing other players kind of talk about him in a sense to be like, everybody was taking notice of him, you know? I even had certain people (saying), ‘He’s legit isn’t he?’, and I’m like, ‘I mean, he’s pretty good. He’s as good as everybody says he is’.
“It was that night in Orleans when he hit the cycle that was the moment when everybody kind of really took notice.”
Becker had already taken notice of that long before then though and it wasn’t necessarily just the highlight — the home runs or spectacular speed and base-running abilities.
Instead, it was the methodical way Bazzana approached every at-bat. The way he, as Becker put it, “very, very rarely” had a bad game.
“I haven’t seen very many hitters come up to the Cape League and be able to do that consistently with the wood bat,” Becker added.
In fact, he doesn’t know if he’s seen anyone as good as the 21-year-old Australian in the Cape before.
“I’ve been up there seven years and he’s arguably the best player that’s been up in the Cape League in the last seven years in my opinion,” Becker said.
“… The thing that stands out to me about Travis and why people gravitate towards him is because he makes everybody around him better. He made all of his teammates better. He made me a better coach by being around him.
“He’s very gracious with his time. He’s very personable, he’ll talk to anybody, he’ll sign any autographs. He’s a people person and he makes everybody around him better.
“And then once he started playing well, it’s like, ‘OK, this kid’s a superstar and he has superstar potential’, not necessarily just because of what he does on the field but because of how he handled himself and all the other situations that he is in because of the type of player that he is.”
The type of player that doesn’t easily forget, closely holding onto the memory of every feat and every failure in the back of his mind.
In fact, to that point, Becker still remembers a conversation he had on the way to the ballpark one day with Bazzana about a representative team he had once missed out on in Australia.
“Hearing him tell me how that fuelled him and how that kind of drove him,” Becker said.
“He had this failure and adversity or he was disappointed because he didn’t make the team but he fuelled it into a huge positive and that instance I think really helped him form this chip on your shoulder mentality and ‘I’m going to prove you wrong’ type of thing.
“And to me that is the ingredient and that is the element of Travis’ game and Travis’ personality and his mindset that is the real separator between him and other people.
“He has that chip on his shoulder and he has it on his shoulder all the time and I think that’s what gives him his edge and that’s what makes Travis Bazzana Travis Bazzana.”
A name that surged up draft boards. A name that became household in baseball circles. And a name that was still somehow relatively unknown back home, where everything began.
But that is all about to change after Bazzana made history on Monday as the first Australian selected in the opening round of the MLB draft.
Maybe now people will start to see what Becker already saw. A level of superstardom that he compared to that of NFL quarterback and two-time Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes.
Becker didn’t say that lightly either. He knew what that means, what Mahomes means to Kansas City. That’s just how highly he thinks of Bazzana – not just as a player, but as a person.
“Patrick Mahomes is a superstar around here,” Becker said.
“… I look at it like he’s got Patrick Mahomes superstar written all over him.
“Him being the type of person that he is, that’s why I feel like I’m able to say that because I know the impact kids like Patrick Mahomes has had on people and knowing Travis Bazzana, I think he has the same type of pedigree.
“… He really is a one-of-a-kind kid. People need to know his story over there because he is an inspiration to not just kids in Australia but kids everywhere. If you set your mind to something, you can accomplish it and I think that’s a message a lot more kids around the world need to hear.”
HOW BAZZANA HELPED ‘SET THE PLATFORM’ FOR AUSTRALIAN BASEBALL
The Brisbane Olympics are less than a decade away and Riddell, the National Player Development Manager at Baseball Australia, is already thinking about what the Games could do for the sport’s growth on a national scale.
But every sport needs a face, someone to first lift up their teammates and then inspire a nation, like Patty Mills did for the Boomers when he dropped 42 points on Slovenia and delivered Australia its first Olympic medal in basketball.
And every sport needs a defining image, like the one of Mills and Boomers teammate Joe Ingles locked in a long embrace that had been years in the making.
History created. A legacy left. And an embrace made only stronger by the knowledge of what the two had been through, the four times the Boomers had come up just short of that elusive medal.
Bazzana and childhood friend Jimmy Nati had that moment of their own in Palo Alto.
Their defining image, one which they had starting sketching out in their minds all those years ago when the idea of playing Division I baseball was supposed to be just a dream.
So, they chose to dream until it became a reality. Until that sketch became his masterpiece.
Now Bazzana has made Australian baseball history and is leaving his own legacy.
“He is probably the catalyst of the next generation of (Australian) baseball,” Riddell said.
“Especially with 2032 being in Brisbane and we’re pushing obviously to get into the Olympics, he’s going to be the centrepiece of that team.”
But Bazzana, also an Academic All-American, has already opened up a pathway for other Australian prospects who may not have previously thought college baseball was a possibility.
It is not that he is the first Australian to take pathway. Many others have come before Bazzana too, also taking the college route.
The difference is that he was straight out of high school, playing for a Power Five school in Division I baseball. And he wasn’t just playing — he was crushing it.
That is particularly important because in Bazzana’s case, especially if he is taken high in next year’s draft, his success is proof of concept.
“Being able to back himself has yes benefited him financially,” Riddell said.
“But there are players that are on a professional contract at 16 in Australia and they go over for two or three years and professional baseball is very difficult, especially as a 16-year-old kid, and a lot of the time they are released by the time they are 19 or 20 and back in Australia, out of the game and we lose them as a sport.
“Not only is going to school going to make him more money than he would have signed for out of high school but it’s kept him in the game longer to be able to get more at-bats and game time to keep building his skills.
“So, who knows if Travis Bazzana had signed as a 16-year-old for five figures or six figures, he could have gone over and struggled his first two or three years, the club could have released him and he could be back in Australia not playing baseball anymore. We’ll never know because he decided to take that risk and go to school.
“He’s sort of set the platform a little bit for the rest of the guys in Australia.”
And while Bazzana may not be a household name in Australia just yet, what he has achieved has certainly not gone unnoticed by those who matter – those who have been with him in different stages of his baseball journey.
Like Matthews, his coach while playing for the Ku-ring-gai Stealers, who said his younger brother was already organising a watch party for the MLB Draft last year.
Or Nati, with whom he since shared so much more than just a line drive to the face, including every single one of his goals before heading to America, ones he has so quickly ticked off as if a shopping list.
“He went over, straight away hit the ground running,” Nati, one of Bazzana’s closest friends, said.
“(He told me), ‘I’m going to be MVP of the West Coast League. I’m going to be the best player of my team as a freshman. I’m going to be an all-American. I’m going to win Golden Spikes and I’m going to be a first-rounder’.
“I’m like, ‘Holy s***. The dude is special’, because he’s literally done everything… it’s pretty incredible to see it.”
And while Bazzana didn’t end up winning the Golden Spikes, college baseball’s most prestigious honour, in most other years he would have been the recipient of the award.
“Nine out of 10 times,” MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis told foxsports.com.au.
As incredible as it may be, this is only just the start for Bazzana, who has already come so far but has never forgotten where he came from in the process.
“I’m a long way from where I want to take it in terms of the impact back home,” Bazzana said.
“It’s pretty special to me but I’ve been working towards this and I just want to continue that.
“Curtis Mead is up in the big leagues right now. That’s just incredible and I want to meet him up there with a bunch of the guys and start to really, really hit the market back home for making Australia a real baseball powerhouse soon.”
When foxsports.com.au spoke with Bazzana last year he was gearing up for his final season with the Beavers, hoping it would end with a trip to Omaha for the College World Series and, if dreams came true, in the winning dugout.
But even though it didn’t, even if it ended like it did in his freshman season, with tears welling in his eyes, his teammates were there to pick him back up. His coach was also there to remind him, in Canham’s own words, “how cool and how special he is”.
How cool and how special exactly? Well, when asked just how big a deal Bazzana has become in college baseball, the Oregon State coach paused. Eight seconds later, he had his answer.
“Everyone in the country knows who he is,” Canham said, “everyone”.
“If you’re a baseball fan… I mean just professional teams, collegiate, high school kids, everyone knows.
“I’d be shocked if there’s many people out there that don’t know or haven’t been inspired by that young man.”
Inspired by his unwavering self-belief. Inspired by his humility. Just inspired by him.
Because when Canham talks about Bazzana, beaming with pride, it is like he is talking about his own son.
“I look at Travis and I love that young man,” the Beavers coach added.
“I’m proud of what he’s done. I know he’s gone through a lot of difficult times, being away from home and what his expectations are of himself.
“If anything, I hope he understands how cool and how special he is. You know, sometimes that can get lost.
“From time to time, it can hit home, but it’s just sitting down and sharing a meal with him and letting him open up or even opening up to him about myself.
“I look at the relationships he has with all the coaches and that he tries to have with all the players. If there is ever an event or recruits around, Travis wants to be involved.
“He wants to talk to kids that want to come to Oregon State that he’s not even going to be here to play with because he cares about this place. He wants the program to continue to be successful well after he’s gone.
“That to me just says a lot… you don’t even talk about the sport, just about the human being, that’s the winner right there. You can put anything in front of him and that guy’s going to find a way to win.”
Source Agencies
