Peter Flaherty still remembers the first time he saw Travis Bazzana.
The then-18-year-old had just arrived in America and was already dominating for the Corvallis Knights in the West Coast League in the summer of 2021.
Flaherty, meanwhile, was helping a friend put a team together for the Cape Cod League, the premier summer wooden bat baseball league.
“I was looking really late one night and this was when he was just arriving fresh after finishing up high school and was going to be a freshman at Oregon State,” he told foxsports.com.au.
“I saw what he did in the West Coast League and I was like, ‘Who is this Bazzana kid? He is unbelievable. I’ve got to see some video on him’ and I pulled up some video and immediately I was just all in.”
So all in that he sent his friend a text message — at 3am in the morning.
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“And I was like, ‘I don’t know if it’s just 3:40 in the morning, but I’m in love with an Australian second baseman named Travis Bazzana’… from a tool standpoint, from watching how he played, it was all there and he had it all going on,” Flaherty said.
“So from that point on, I was hooked.”
Flaherty is a national analyst and writer at Baseball America, where he tracks every draft eligible player in the country, be it at the college or high school level, and evaluates them.
When it came to Bazzana, who is in the conversation for the first overall pick in this month’s Major League Baseball draft, Flaherty was clearly a fan from the very beginning.
He wasn’t the only one. Joe Doyle, a senior analyst at Future Star Series, also first saw Bazzana playing for the Knights, around two years before he crushed the Cape Cod League on his way to being named MVP.
Doyle didn’t know who he was but said Bazzana was immediately the best player in the league.
“I saw him play against the Walla Walla Sweets twice and he got three or four hits every single game against college students,” Doyle told foxsports.com.au.
“So sophomores and college juniors throwing 90 to 92 [miles per hour] and this was just some random high school kid coming out of Australia.”
TRAVIS BAZZANA SERIES
PART ONE: The start of a dream… and critics that fuelled his fire
PART TWO: The ‘rare’ call that helped take Bazzana to another level
As it turned out, this mysterious wonder from down under was only just getting started in what later became a record-breaking rise to prominence, with Bazzana putting his name in the Oregon State history books alongside the legendary ones he and so many other Beavers look up to.
The Australian became the program’s all-time leader in home runs, stolen bases, runs scored, doubles, hits and walks while also holding the single-season record for homers, runs scored and total bases.
“I’ll just put it this way — I did not think he was this special,” Doyle said when asked to compare the Bazzana he first saw at the West Coast League and the Bazzana he sees now, who was a finalist for the Golden Spikes Award — college baseball’s most prestigious honour.
In most other years Bazzana would have been the recipient of the award.
“Nine out of 10 times,” MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis told foxsports.com.au.
It just so happened Bazzana was up against a home-run hitting machine in Georgia’s Charlie Condon, who is also now of the biggest threats to the Australian going first overall to the Cleveland Guardians in this month’s draft.
With the draft fast approaching, foxsports.com.au spoke to Callis, Doyle and Flaherty to break down where Bazzana stands in this year’s class and put into context just how historic his career at Oregon State was.
SO, WHAT DOES BAZZANA DO WELL?
The better question may be what he doesn’t do well because, as clichéd as it may seem, Bazzana does “everything well” according to Doyle.
Such as?
“He swings at the right pitches,” Doyle began.
“He hits velocity. He hits spin. He hits sliders. He hits change ups. He hits pitches at the top of the zone. He hit pitches at the bottom of the zone. He uses the whole field. He hits the ball hard.”
Doyle did admit there is one thing that Bazzana can’t do — he can’t be 6-foot-3.
“That’s the only thing going against Travis Bazzana,” he said of the 6-foot Australian infielder.
“Metrically, he literally does everything well.”
Bazzana’s height is particularly interesting in this year’s draft though given how it compares to the top prospects expected to go around him.
“Charlie Condon is 6-foot-5 and he plays third base in right field with a ton of power. Jac Caglianone is 6-foot-6, left handed and he plays first base. Nick Kurtz is 6-foot-5 and plays first base,” Doyle said.
“So every single one of the players that is around Travis Bazzana in the draft has like six inches on him.
“But he’s faster than all of them. He’s going to play in the middle of the diamond instead of at first base which is a huge plus for him. But it’s interesting the duality between Travis Bazzana and the guys that are going to get drafted around him in terms of size.
“It’s just so unprecedented. It’s very unique.”
Bazzana finished his final season at Oregon State hitting .407 with a .568 on base percentage and .911 slugging percentage while, according to MLB.com, he struck out on just 9.1 per cent of his plate appearances and was walked 25.7 per cent of the time.
“I do think people regard him as the best pure hitter in the draft in terms of hitting average, controlling the strike zone,” Callis said.
“And there aren’t that many players who are going to go in the upper half of this draft who are going to play up the middle. It’s lot of third baseman and first baseman and corner outfielders.
“I don’t think he’s necessarily going to go up to second base, but he can stay in the second base. He’s fine at second base.”
MLB.com conducted a survey of “26 higher-level members of the scouting industry, from cross-checkers to scouting directors and general managers”, in late May to get an idea of how this year’s draft class was viewed.
As part of that process, the team executives surveyed were asked to rank the top 10 draft prospects. Bazzana came out on top with 17 first-place votes.
Callis said of the people who picked Bazzana, the hit tool and ability to play up the middle were the “two biggest factors”
“Teams love that about Travis,” he said.
HOW DID BAZZANA GO TO ANOTHER LEVEL?
While Bazzana’s combination of plate discipline and contact skills gives him a high floor, his new-found home run power in his last season at Oregon State has elevated his ceiling too.
The Sydney native recorded a school-record 28 home runs this season, which was a product of minor adjustments Bazzana made, adding a slight tip to his swing.
It was a small change but just another example of the analytical mind of Bazzana at work, always looking for an edge over the rest of the competition.
“Now I think you’re looking at him as a legit 20 to 25 home run guy and he did that without sacrificing the hitting ability, without sacrificing his ability to fill up the strike zone,” Callis said.
“The increased power makes you like him even more. That said, I think coming into the year, we thought he was probably going to be a top-five overall draft pick, even if you thought it was more 15 to 20 homer power at the big league level.
“Even if he just had, say, more average power or even slightly below average power, the rest of the game is so good, it’d still be extremely attractive.”
Callis wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Doyle said he had Bazzana as a top-three player in the draft both last November and this February before the 21-year-old’s power hitting really started to come to the fore.
Flaherty, meanwhile, had seen Bazzana hit six home runs in the Cape Cod League after taking home both MVP honours and the batting title with numbers of .375/.456/.581.
“Just watching how he is in the box and how the swing works, I wasn’t at all concerned about his power,” Flaherty said.
That was especially true when he learned Bazzana, forever a student of the game, had spent his first summer in Seattle at Driveline perfecting his swing.
“He optimised his launch angle and tweaked his swing to kind of maximise the overall upside of it,” Flaherty said.
“So I wasn’t at all surprised to see him go off and hit for more power. I wasn’t all that concerned with his ability to impact the baseball and drive the baseball.”
If anything, Doyle said any conversation about Bazzana’s increased power should start with how he improved on his freshman year, where he hit six home runs.
After his first season at Oregon State, where Bazzana hit .306/.425/.478, Doyle had his as his 25th ranked player in this year’s draft.
“Now I have him as a top three player because of the bat speed that he added,” Doyle said.
HOW BAZZANA’S MAKEUP SETS HIM APART
But again, if there is one thing to take from Bazzana’s journey to this point, it is that all his success has been earned and is the product of a work ethic and drive to win like few others his age.
To further underline that, you only have to go back to when Bazzana was just 13 years old and attending a player evaluation tour held by NxtGen Baseball, the performance company founded and run by Ryan Rowland-Smith.
“He was the one kid in those evaluations who brought a pen and a pad and was writing down every little note and he was setting up what his goals were for the next two years, the next 10 years,” Rowland-Smith told foxsports.com.au.
“It was insane, I’ve never seen anything like it for a kid that age.”
It was just a sign of what was to come from Bazzana, who later gave presentations to his Beavers teammates about sliders and induced vertical break and then champion habits.
Some scouts told Baseball America he gave one of the most impressive in-person interviews they have ever done.
The first time Doyle spoke with Bazzana was after his freshman year at Oregon State, in the summer of 2022.
“And that’s when it became pretty clear how special he was just in terms of his mindset,” Doyle said.
“I mean, he has got to be the most driven, self-motivated player in person I’ve talked to in six or seven years. He has turned over every single stone at his disposal to get better. He’s gotten bigger. He’s gotten stronger. He’s gotten smarter.”
He went from 11 home runs as a sophomore to 28 in 2024. That was no accident.
“He made a conscious effort to hit full power and explained what he was doing and he still walked more than ever and struck out less than ever,” Callis said.
“I mean, it’s just a very impressive combination.”
Bazzana spoke to Callis and his colleagues Jonathan Mayo and Jason Ratliff on the Pipeline Podcast back in March and after that brief conversation, Callis was “blown away”.
“I had even more faith in Travis after just listening to that,” he said.
“Because at some point he’s going to face better pitching if he gets up towards the big leagues or against the big leagues and he’s going to have to make some adjustments.
“He’ll probably hit some adversity at some point. But he had one of the most thorough understandings of his game of players I’ve talked to.”
Flaherty, meanwhile, said Bazzana’s makeup is “probably more impressive than his on-field skills”.
“Which I think speaks volumes,” he added.
Beavers head coach Mitch Canham described the Australian as “part of the 0.0001 per cent” when speaking to foxsports.com.au last year, recounting the moment Bazzana got “quite emotional” after being offered a scholarship to Oregon State.
“This is something that he had said he’s been wanting his whole life,” Canham added.
But once it had happened, Bazzana wasn’t just content on simply being a Beaver. He wanted to be a leader. The face of the program.
More important than anything else, he wanted to lead Oregon State to Omaha and while that didn’t end up happening, Bazzana tried everything in his power to realise that dream.
“The thing I think that was really interesting in talking to people in the Oregon State program and talking to some scouts that are involved with possibly selecting Travis in the draft is the resounding thing is he was acting as a coach for that Oregon State team in a way,” Doyle said.
“I mean he elevated everybody around him because he’s so hellbent on becoming the best version of himself and beating the opponent that a lot of it has rubbed off on guys in the Beaver dugout and in the Beaver clubhouse that [already] have a little bit of that in their DNA.
“But he just kind of cranked it up to 100 in the clubhouse. So he’s made everyone around him better. He’s given guys avenues that they can use to go out and get better. I just think it speaks to how he’s the type of guy that can set a culture for an entire organisation.”
HOW IMPRESSIVE WAS HIS OREGON STATE CAREER?
Well, the numbers themselves go a long way to answering that question, although you also have to factor in just how highly-regarded the Oregon State baseball program is to understand the magnitude of what he achieved during his time with the Beavers.
That starts with learning about the names that came before Bazzana. Names like Adley Rutschman, Jacoby Ellsbury, Nick Madrigal and Steven Kwan.
“It’s hard to put in words how impressive it is,” Flaherty said.
“Oregon State is one of the premier programs in all of college baseball. They’ve won national championships. They have had a handful of major league players go through their program, most notably Adley Rutschman with the Orioles and even Steven Kwan with the Guardians along with a handful of others. So there have been pretty unbelievable players that have played there.
“For Travis to go in and break however many program records and single season records to basically kind of go down as one of, if not the best player in school history — it’s really, really unbelievable. So he had a season that will probably withstand the test of time.”
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
BAZZANA’S SINGLE SEASON RECORDS
Home runs: 28
Runs: 84
Total bases: 195
Slugging percentage: .911
Stolen bases: 36
Walks: 76*
*tied for single-season record
Then you also have to consider the fact Bazzana should have been at a disadvantage when he first arrived at Corvallis given he didn’t have the same amount of at-bats against the same level of competition as most high-level American prep prospects.
But for Doyle, Bazzana’s success — while obviously saying a lot about his individual makeup — is also a testament to his growth as a player and person in the Australian Baseball League.
A 15-year-old Bazzana played his first season in the ABL for the Sydney Blue Sox in 2018, when he was 10 years younger than the league’s average player.
“The thing that really strikes me is his immediate success in college baseball in the United States in the Pac-12, it really speaks to the level of competition of some of the guys that he was seeing in the Australian Baseball League,” Doyle said.
“He didn’t get the opportunity to play high school baseball in the United States and play on the showcase circuit where there’s a tonne of guys throwing you know 92, 93, 94 miles an hour.
“He just came straight over from Australia after playing for Sydney and his talent and tools and skills translated better than any other high school player that made it to college that year. “… It really speaks to how far Australian baseball has come and I think it serves baseball in general to start taking notice of Australian baseball because there’s a lot of good players out there.”
WHEN WILL HE BE DRAFTED?
Now, for the most important question.
When foxsports.com.au spoke to Callis for this story in mid-June, he said “if you surveyed teams I bet you at least two-thirds of teams believe Cleveland’s going to take Travis”.
That has since changed.
In his latest mock draft for MLB Pipeline, Callis wrote that the Cleveland Guardians appear to have four leading candidates to take first overall: Bazzana, Georgia’s Charlie Condon, Florida’s Jac Caglianone or West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt.
Only complicating matters though is that the Guardians, according to Callis, are also “calculating their signability”. What does that mean?
Well, Cleveland has a record bonus pool of $18,334,000 ($A27.4m), with the first overall pick coming with a slot value of $10,570,600 ($A15.8m) — up 8.7 per cent from last season.
“The bonus pool is essentially a salary cap,” Callis said.
“So sometimes it’s not just figuring out the players,” he added, giving the hypothetical example that if one player would sign for $9 million and another would agree to $7 million, that extra $2 million could be used for players later in the draft.
“To me, you can’t let signability get in the way of ability, but some teams factor in signability more than ability or more than I would and it becomes a factor.”
Callis wrote in his latest mock that if Bazzana doesn’t go No.1, he could fall to the Oakland Athletics at No.4, with Condon and Caglianone in play for either the Cincinnati Reds at No.2 or Colorado Rockies at No.3.
In that scenario, Bazzana would pocket a signing bonus of $8,370,800 ($A12.6m) if taken fourth overall by the A’s.
“Thus,” Callis wrote, “Bazzana theoretically should be more amenable to accepting a bonus in the $8.5 million-to-8.75 million ($A12.8m-13.1m) range from Cleveland”.
Wetherholt, meanwhile, was MLB Pipeline’s top-rated prospect entering the year but suffered a serious hamstring just four games into his junior season.
The West Virginia middle infielder went on to miss half of the season and slipped down draft boards but has since risen back up, with Callis noting he “rivals Bazzana as the best pure hitter available and is more athletic”.
“Though he does offer less power,” Callis added.
While obviously things can move quickly with the draft fast approaching, Callis wrote that for now he believes Cleveland’s choice comes down to Bazzana and Wetherholt, with Condon the fourth option should he not be willing to take a discount on the No.1 slot.
If you asked him to give each player a percentage chance of being taken first overall, he has Bazzana (35) leading the way followed by Wetherholt (30), Caglianone (20) and Condon (10).
The rest of the field (“Chase Burns, Konnor Griffin and maybe Hagen Smith”) make up the other 5 per cent.
When speaking to foxsports.com.au in mid-June, Callis said he thought the “majority of other teams” believed Cleveland would take Bazzana.
Obviously the picture at the top of the draft seems to be more wide-open at this point, but Callis’ broader comments at the time about why Bazzana might appeal to the Guardians still remain relevant.
“He kind of fits the model of players that they’ve shown preference for in the past,” Callis said.
“…. If they’re choosing players who can hit for average versus a player who can hit for power, they’ve taken the guys to hit for average more often. And they’ve taken a lot of middle infielders who project to have more offence than players typical at that position rather than, say, corner guys who are sluggers.
“I mean, I’m kind of painting this with a broad brush, so it’s more speculation. But I think teams just believe that Travis kind of fits the model of what Cleveland has shown preference for in the past, which again, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it this year, but we’re still early enough out from the draft that there’s not a lot of concrete information.”
Flaherty, meanwhile, said he personally would take Bazzana first overall and “not even think twice about it”.
“The tools, the makeup. He’s the entire package and at every single level that he’s been at,” Flaherty added.
“… I think that he has an incredibly enticing set of tools that will make him an incredibly high impact Major League player sooner rather than later. And then circling back to the character and makeup aspect of it all, he is just an outstanding human being and the knowledge of the game that he possesses, his hunger to win and hunger to get better.
“That is going to serve him really, really well over the course of what I think will be a great career. So for me, it’s a no-brainer.”
Bazzana’s standout performance at the Cape Cod League also works in his favour, given he proved he can hit with a wooden bat — as he will need to in the Major League.
“Nowadays with the nature of metal bats and college baseball, it’s really important for scouts and evaluators to see how guys do with wood,” Flaherty said.
“I’ve never quite seen, I know I’m on the young side, but I’ve never seen someone dominate the Cape League quite like Travis did. He was rightfully named the MVP and the tools that I’ve referred to a lot that make him such a special player were on full display all summer.”
Looking at the Guardians specifically, there is a conversation to be had about whether Bazzana has the defensive versatility to make him the right fit, especially when you consider they already have Andres Gimenez at second base.
Although again, this comes back to whether Cleveland’s draft philosophy is to prioritise talent or fit/need.
Either way, the long-term plan may be for Gimenez to shift to shortstop while Flaherty also said Bazzana could be capable of playing outfield if required.
“From a positional standpoint, I’m really high on Travis’s defensive ability at second base,” he said.
“He’s an elite level athlete. He has present arm strength and I like him a lot over there. With that being said, whoever it is that ends up taking him if it’s Cleveland or someone else, if they want to try him out in the outfield, I’d also be extremely confident in that as well.
“He can really, really run, his baseball sense is off the charts and there’s arm strength. So I think that those are a lot of qualities that would translate well to the outfield, whether it’s pulling it down for a couple of games in a pinch or playing there long-term, I have no doubt he’d be an effective outfielder at professional level if that’s what it came down to.”
The draft will take place on Monday the 15th of July at 7am (AEST) in conjunction with the MLB All-Star Game at Globe Life Field, where Bazzana is all but guaranteed to make Australian sporting history as the country’s first player to be taken in the opening round.
Whether he goes first overall or not, Flaherty had a clear message for Australians who still haven’t heard of the 21-year-old: you aren’t too late to hop on the Bazzana bandwagon.
“He hasn’t even been drafted yet and what he has already achieved, it’s really, really unbelievable,” Flaherty said.
“He has dominated and excelled at every stop in his career and for him, I think the scary part is that it’s just the beginning.
“Everyone in Australia is going to have the opportunity to follow and cheer on what I think is going to be potentially the future face of Major League Baseball.”