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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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.
Now that ceiling could be worth millions, with Bazzana rocketing up draft boards and projected by some experts to even be in contention for the first overall pick in the 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) Draft.
Last year’s top pick, right-handed pitcher Paul Skenes, earned a record $9.2 million USD signing bonus.
MLB.com draft and prospect expert Jonathan Mayo had Bazzana as his third pick from this year’s class, as does Carlos Collazo of Baseball America, who described the Australian as a “standout athlete”.
ESPN’s MLB Insider Kiley McDaniel also has mocked Bazzana at No.3, which would send him the Colorado Rockies after this month’s draft lottery saw the Cleveland Guardians draw the first overall pick.
But even if Bazzana isn’t taken at the top of the draft, he already looks set to make Australian sporting history as the country’s first player to be taken in the opening round.
It comes after a standout season at Oregon State, where he batted a team-best .374 with 20 doubles, 11 home runs and 55 runs batted in (RBI) while also setting a school record 36 stolen bases.
The Sydney native then backed that up by being named MVP of the prestigious Cape Cod League, which is widely regarded as the best summer baseball league for college students in the world.
Despite all of that, the name Travis Bazzana still remains largely unfamiliar in Australia.
That could all be about to change.
“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 — along with White Sox closer Liam Hendriks and Rays top prospect Curtis Mead — 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 to prominence in college baseball as the 21-year-old looks set to make Australian baseball history next year.
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.
“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 has taken 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 is now going to parlay into probably millions next July in the draft,” Riddell said.
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 will be 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, have got into the habit of swapping books.
For example, earlier in the 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 Beavers coach Mitch Canham.
“I think just from that initial encounter,” Canham said, “we knew this guy was the real deal.”
*****
In the second part of the series, foxsports.com.au speaks to Bazzana’s coaches in America to get an insight into just how the Australian found himself rocketing up draft boards.
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