By Vince Rugari
Ryan Rowland-Smith could see it more or less straight away.
A former Major League Baseball pitcher for the Seattle Mariners, who plucked him out of Australia 24 years ago, Rowland-Smith still lives in Seattle, works for the MLB Network as a media analyst and runs a junior academy, NxtGen Baseball, on the side. NxtGen operates tours where talented young players from Australia travel to America for a taste of the big time. Like 12-year-old Travis Bazzana, who went on the 2016 trip.
It quickly became apparent that this Bazzana kid was not normal, in the best possible way.
“Usually, you have a parent, mum or dad and a teenager, and you’re like, ‘All right, listen, this is how the college system works, once you get into year one, year two ...’ But he already knew all the answers,” Rowland-Smith, now 41, said.
“Every college prospect, who they were, he knew this hitting coach, he knew this hitting philosophy. I was like, ‘Oh, man. OK. He knows more than I do.’”
On the last day of the trip, all the players had one-on-one evaluations, where they were asked what they’d learned and what their goals were.
Travis Bazzana is the projected number one pick at the MLB draft.Credit: Getty
“I know this sounds very, like, who cares,” Rowland-Smith said. “But he’s got a pen and paper, and he’s writing notes. And I’m like, ‘Man, look at that.’ These other kids just kind of look at you with this thousand-yard stare: ‘Whatever. Can we just go back to the shopping mall?’ He’s sitting there, he’s taking notes, he’s so dialled into what he needs to do.”
They stayed in touch. A couple of years later, Rowland-Smith brought him out again to audition for college teams, and Bazzana had developed an even stronger aura. He had made it his mission to make himself the centre of attention, and emptied his tank.
“There’s 50 teams there, six fields, recruiters all over the place, hundreds of kids ... and these recruiters just gravitated towards him,” Rowland-Smith said.
“You just don’t have that presence unless you’re the biggest kid, or the one throwing the hardest or whatever. But he manufactured that presence. A lot of these Australian kids, they play this underdog mentality: ‘I should be lucky just to get a chance.’ He had this mindset of like, ‘No, I’m going to be the best kid.’
“I’ve been around a bunch of alphas, some of the best players on the planet, and they have something different where they just ... you can’t look away. And he had that.”
You probably haven’t heard of Travis Bazzana, but he’s about to become a very big deal. The MLB Draft is on this weekend and he is widely projected to be the top pick, which belongs to the Cleveland Guardians, although he could be taken at No.2 by the Cincinnati Reds. Nobody, including him, knows for sure because there is still a bit of built-in subterfuge about the whole process. Either way, he will make Australian sporting history; no Australian player has ever been taken in the first round before.
Just by being selected, he will pocket a signing bonus which could be as high as $15 million. That’s separate from his salary, which, if he has the sort of career he is planning to have, will soon make that number look minuscule.
Nobody around him seems scared of over-hyping him, because in a way he seems custom-built for this. Which is just as well, because the hype is inescapable right now.
“It’s been a big change since I sort of reached a level where the expectations go greater, and the draft hype got much greater in the US,” Bazzana told this masthead.
“I’m just learning how to navigate those things. I have a lot of adult conversations. I have to say no to people a little more – a little bit less time on your hands and keeping the right people close.”
Bazzana is an almost self-taught prodigy, his emergence a perfect storm of circumstances which have combined to enable Australia to produce an elite talent from a base of just 54,081 participants according to AusPlay estimates.
He was simply never going to be anything else.
“My parents would be like, ‘Get off your phone. You’re spending your whole time on your phone,’ and they’d think I was like just scrolling and stuff,” Bazzana said.
“But I was literally just watching YouTube videos on baseball, all night long kind of thing, for a lot of time. In computer class in year three or four, I’d be on my computer watching MLB.com highlights. And then after school, first thing I’d do is get home and watch the day’s baseball highlights from the US.
“I was reading, watching YouTube videos of training and coaches and interviews and as much as I could find about any Major League players for hours ... I was just obsessed with athletic training and how I could make myself faster, and I’d watch Usain Bolt running clips for hours, just trying to become a better athlete and a better baseball player, and I was obsessed with it and was trying to find any resource and edge I could. I still am, to this day.”
The genesis of this obsession, as is the case with 99.9 per cent of Australians involved with baseball, is family. His father, Gary, played for the Norths club in Lismore, where he and his wife Jenny are both from. After they got married, they moved to Wahroonga in Sydney’s upper north shore and had three sons. Travis is the youngest, and because the older two also played the game, he effectively grew up around organised baseball, and showed a knack for hitting balls from an early age.
He was always a good kid. But it’s like now he’s got a 40-year-old head on a 20-year-old’s shoulders.
Garry Bazzana, Travis’s father
Bazzana also played cricket, rugby union and soccer as a kid – following the Wests Tigers, Swans, Sydney Thunder and Los Angeles Dodgers – but baseball was always the sport he was most passionate about. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, he could find out pretty much everything he could ever want to know about even the most minor parts of the game, as well as what he had to do to reach the required levels, and he had the personality and discipline to go with the genetic gifts to be able to put those lessons into practice.
He is the embodiment of something Kobe Bryant, the athlete he most admired growing up, famously said: “Once you know what it is in life that you want to do, then the world basically becomes your library.”
Australia’s tiny baseball footprint was actually a blessing. It meant he was exposed to competition against adults at a younger age, including against professionals in the Australian Baseball League, where he briefly featured for the Sydney Blue Sox. And because the community was so small, he was able to connect fairly easily with ex-pros, work under them and heed to their advice. There are 38 Australians to have played at least one game in MLB, and Bazzana has probably met a dozen of them.
Rowland-Smith, for example, helped Bazzana land a scholarship through a former teammate who is a coach at Oregon State University, where the baseball program is considered one of the best in the country.
“He lived in my house for two-and-a-half months a couple of summers ago,” Rowland-Smith said. “And he’s sitting there and he’s just on his computer, every evening. I’m like, ‘Trav, what are you working on there?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m working on this presentation to give [our] pitchers,’ like an analytical breakdown of what their best pitch is and how they should face this guy, that guy. He’s just fixated on it. It’s wild, man.”
Bazzana is coming off a simply awesome stint in college with the Oregon State Beavers. He began there in 2022 and leaves now as the program’s all-time record-holder for hits, as well as holding the all-time and single season records for home runs. He was also named a first-team All-American, which means he was the best player in the country in his position.
At age 16, Bazzana reckons he was a good baseballer, but nothing special. Now he is being talked about as a generational talent, a hitting machine who has developed at a faster rate than his peers in the last couple of years and shot up MLB teams’ draft boards.
“I joke with people that in the time has been away, it’s like he’s grown up in dog years,” his father Gary said.
Travis Bazzana in action for the Beavers of Oregon State University.Credit: Getty
“He was always a good kid. But it’s like now he’s got a 40-year-old head on a 20-year-old’s shoulders. He’s just so together. Having rolled with him for a couple of weeks, there’s so much going on every day in his world: give me tickets, give me an autograph, give me interviews, give me something. And then somehow at the end of that day, he’s got to clear his head and go out and play. He just seems to be able to handle it all at the moment.”
Does he want to go pick No.1? Even his answer to that displays maturity beyond his years.
“It’d be cool,” Bazzana said. “On my side of things, the more I put it out there that I want to go (number) one over everything, then the team would want to use that in negotiating power and they’re going to offer less. I’m not going to get my hopes up, nor am I going to sort of get caught up on going first overall, but it’s definitely a possibility.”
This is uncharted territory for Australian baseball. A third of the aforementioned 38 MLB players were pitchers. That makes it harder for baseball novices in Australia to follow their careers because starting pitchers play every four or five days, and relief pitchers could be called in from the bullpen at any moment. But Bazzana is a hitter and a second baseman, and so he is expected to become an ‘everyday player’, a lock in the starting line-up of the team which drafts him. Australia really hasn’t had one of those since David Nilsson, who starred for the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1990s. In fact, we’ve not come even remotely close: an everyday player would typically see around 500 to 600 at bats per season, but the last Aussie to see 400 at bats in their entire career was Nilsson.
David Nilsson flew the Australian flag in MLB during the 1990s.Credit: Getty Images
“An everyday player, you can turn it on: Oh, there’s my Aussie. Boom, off I go,” Rowland-Smith said. “If he can be a face for baseball and have that appeal to kids, I think it’s really gonna help the game. Kids are gonna look up to Trav. It’s not his responsibility at all, I’m not saying, he has to do this. It’ll just be interesting to see how it plays out, and if it organically kind of happens where he is that.”
It sounds like it might.
Bazzana says his “purpose” is to help to grow baseball in Australia. He sees no reason why those within it shouldn’t reach for the stars like him, or why the sport can’t emulate the strides made recently by basketball, even if they’re coming off a much lower base.
If you personally don’t care about baseball, Bazzana wants to change that.
“As my career has evolved, this opportunity has just kind of come with it,” he said.
“I’ve got the chance to go out and hopefully have a great career at the highest level and be an advocate and a support and a resource for people back home in Australia, and give back to the baseball community. There’s no doubt in my mind that at least the population that is the baseball community right now will get better and get stronger and have higher goals and beliefs and start to pull it that way. And then with that, if we’re bringing some of our most successful athletes in the world on the baseball field in a couple of years … I think it’s super realistic.”
His bucket list accords with all of this: before he hangs them up, he wants to win at least “a couple” of World Series, as well as an Olympic medal with Australia, and compete for a World Baseball Classic title with Australia.
So nothing too crazy.
First, he has to navigate life as a potential No.1 draft pick, and everything that comes with it. Back in the day, it used to take players a few years before they actually made their MLB debuts. Not any more.
“With him, what’s gonna happen is – especially in this age of social media, and everything else – [draftees] are getting to the big leagues way faster,” said Rowland-Smith.
“Like Paul Skenes: first pick overall last year, the next year he’s in the big leagues, and it was the most hyped-up thing, like crazy. Bryce Harper, same thing. What’s gonna happen with Travis is he’s gonna be first, second pick, overall, whatever – and then there’s just going to be this clock, this friggin’ ticking time bomb of, ‘All right, When’s he going to arrive?’ And it’s going to be quick.
“Everyone’s going to be anticipating it, you’ve got this whole social media environment that goes on that’ll just be pumping it up. And then boom, he’s gonna land on the scene. Whatever team he’s with, they’ll pack the place out, and the pressure will be on. They’ll just expect big things straight out of the gates. Everyone’s gonna know who he is.”
Sports news, results and expert commentary. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.