MLB draft 2024: Travis Bazzana’s rise to potential No. 1 pick

GROWING UP in Australia, Travis Bazzana heard the warnings. Dream small. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Blend in with everyone. The sentiment is so deeply ingrained in Bazzana’s homeland that it’s got a name: tall poppy syndrome, after farmers’ habit of cutting down the largest flowers in a field so they don’t stand out.

None of it made much sense to him. Bazzana, listed at 6-foot but probably a tick shorter, was never the most imposing athlete on any given field. He needed something to bridge the physical gap. So he studied. He watched videos of Mike Trout and Ken Griffey Jr., Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, the best at their crafts. And as he began to understand the commonalities they shared, Bazzana, who is among the favorites to be taken with the No. 1 pick in Sunday’s Major League Baseball draft, came to a conclusion that guided him to the apex of college baseball and will serve as the foundation in his pursuit of similar success in pro ball: Excellence cannot exist in a world where it’s constantly pruned.

“All I wanted to know was why great people were great,” said Bazzana, a left-handed-hitting second baseman who for the past three seasons led Oregon State to a 134-54 record. “And when you watch, you string the pieces together. They all have extreme belief in themselves. They don’t really set limited expectations. They’re always looking to one-up where they’ve been.

“I was always competitive. That’s the one thing that I think was the base for me to go far in whatever I was pursuing: a competitive nature to where I was going to find a way to be a little bit better than the next guy or the guy next to me or whoever I was competing with.”

When the Cleveland Guardians make the first pick in the draft Sunday at 7 p.m. ET, they could go with the next guy (Georgia slugger Charlie Condon) or the guy next to him (West Virginia shortstop JJ Wetherholt), or perhaps an alternate choice who allows them to float more of their $18.3 million in bonus-pool money to later picks. Across the industry, though, there is belief that Bazzana is the sort of player Cleveland covets — a metric darling whose studious nature and alpha personality far outweigh the disadvantages that typically accompany undersized players.

Cleveland’s franchise third baseman, Jose Ramirez, stands 5-foot-9 and will play in his sixth All-Star Game on Tuesday night. The Guardians left fielder, Steven Kwan, also 5-foot-9, leads MLB with a .363 batting average and will start alongside Aaron Judge and Juan Soto in the American League outfield. Kwan was drafted by Cleveland in 2018 after three years at Oregon State — four years before Bazzana arrived in 2022, then an unknown commodity who showed quickly his anonymity would be short-lived.

The last player to jump from Australia to a Power 5 conference baseball program was Craig Shipley, who debuted for Alabama in 1982. For the next 40 years, the Australian pipeline fed almost exclusively through international signings with MLB teams — and with a fair amount of success, from Liam Hendriks to Grant Balfour, Dave Nilsson to Peter Moylan. A rare few Australian players matriculated to small Division I schools and junior colleges, but none until Bazzana started at a high-level program.

For Bazzana to find himself in this position, then, strikes him as an opportunity. Not just to reap perhaps the largest signing bonus in draft history at between $9 million and $10 million but to help redefine Australian baseball. He wants to be the tallest poppy — and to illustrate to those at home that there’s no shame in that.

“He understands that he’s doing this for the whole country,” said Trent Oeltjen, an Australian who spent three years in the major leagues and now serves as a mentor to Bazzana. “And he knows all the kids are now looking up to him and want to be in Travis Bazzana’s shoes. He remembers where he comes from, and he’s very proud of where he did come from, and he’s driving to really change the game of international students and Australians to follow behind him.”

BAZZANA’S EARLIEST MEMORIES involve baseball. He remembers hitting tennis balls off a tee at 2 years old. By the time he was 3, Bazzana was playing with 6-year-olds. As he grew up, he kept playing up two or three years — always the smallest on the field, always competitive, nevertheless.

He grew up in Hornsby, a suburb about a half-hour northwest of Sydney. His father, Gary, had started playing baseball at 10 years old, fell in love with the game and passed along the passion to Travis, the youngest of his three sons.

Around the same age, Bazzana met Oeltjen, and three years later, they traveled to the United States as part of an Australian national team. The trip opened Bazzana’s eyes to all of the possibilities the game offered. He wanted to dream big.

“I just sat him down and said, ‘Trav, never change,'” Oeltjen said. “People are going to try to mold you and all these different things. I said always just be yourself. Just be you. You’ve got something special, everyone sees it, so just mold it and make it your own. And he’s done that.”

By the time he was 15, Bazzana was playing in the Australian Baseball League, a winter league typically populated by minor leaguers that counts Ronald Acuna Jr. among its alumni. At 16, Bazzana chose to forego signing with a major league organization — the Detroit Tigers and Pittsburgh Pirates were the most interested, offering signing bonuses in the $100,000 range — and dedicated his efforts to playing college ball abroad.

While his grades were strong, Bazzana needed more to pique colleges’ interest and hoped a strong academic profile would prove a difference-maker for anyone with doubts about his background. He started to study for the SAT, spent months blitzing through practice tests and scored a 1360, around the 93rd percentile. By the time he was 17, top programs were actively recruiting Bazzana, and in October 2019, he committed to Oregon State, which had won the College World Series the prior year.

As happy as friends and family were for Bazzana, they worried. The Americans, Bazzana was told, are so strong. They’re bigger and faster. They’re smooth in the field, too. Are you sure this is the right thing to do?

“I have all the resources they have,” Bazzana said he believed then. “I just have to know how to do it and implement the right training and the right plan and the right thought process.”

He proved immediately he belonged. The summer before his freshman season, he led the West Coast League, full of college players, with a .429 batting average. It was nearly 60 points ahead of the next-best player. As a freshman, he OPS’d over .900, retooled his swing before his sophomore season and jumped to a .374/.500/.622 line with 36 stolen bases in 39 attempts and more walks than strikeouts. The next summer, he won the MVP award in the Cape Cod League, the best collection of summer ball talent in the game.

That still wasn’t enough for Bazzana. To become the best version of himself, Bazzana knew he needed more power (he hit 11 home runs as a sophomore). He pored over video of Mookie Betts, Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Ramirez — all 5-foot-9 or shorter, all with proven track records of hitting for power at the major league level. As he had in his studies of the mental game, Bazzana came to a clear conclusion: All of the most powerful small players in the major leagues did the majority of their damage by punishing balls to the pull side. Though Bazzana prided himself on an ability to hit to all fields, doing so was hindering his full potential.

“There’s guys that hardly hit the ball over 105 miles an hour that hit 30 home runs,” Bazzana said. “I mean, you see Mookie go out and do it all the time and Altuve and Bregman. Jose Ramirez. Not comparing myself to those guys, but I knew there was more than just being a 6-7 behemoth hitting balls 119 miles an hour to produce slug. And all I wanted to do is figure out how, in my frame, can I get myself the best opportunity to produce slug?”

Bazzana would hop into his Nissan Rogue and truck four hours to Kent, Washington, the location of Driveline Baseball, the game’s foremost independent player development operation. He would hit for 90 minutes, making small tweaks, all to groove his swing for more pull-side power. By the time the season rolled around, he was a positively modern player: almost fully optimized, at the intersection where relentless work and data-driven insight meet.

He homered in his third at-bat of the season and hit two more in the third game. In mid-March, he hammered leadoff home runs in four consecutive games and hit eight tanks in a five-game stretch. Half his batted balls went 100-plus miles per hour. His 90th percentile exit velocity was 108.9 mph. While the adjustment to wood bats will take some juice out of that number, the fact that he’s in the vicinity of Boston Red Sox star Rafael Devers (108.9), Baltimore Orioles star Gunnar Henderson (109.0) and San Diego Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr. (108.8) speaks to the sort of company he’s capable of keeping.

By the end of the season, Bazzana’s numbers were otherworldly: .407/.568/.911 with 28 home runs, 76 walks and just 37 strikeouts in 296 plate appearances. Bazzana’s transformation validated not only his work to achieve it but his decision to carve a new path for international players.

“There’s an obsession with Trav to be great, to be No. 1,” Oeltjen said. “And he has found the information. It’s a different world. It’s all accessible. But he’s been so hungry and obsessed with being the best in every arena that he’s pretty much molded himself into the machine he is today.”

IN 2018, when Bazzana was 15, he opened the notes app on his phone and started to type out a projection of Australia’s roster for the 2026 World Baseball Classic. Batting first, playing second base: Travis Bazzana.

That year, he had read a book called “Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable,” by Tim Grover, Michael Jordan’s personal trainer. Now, occasionally on his jaunt from Corvallis to Kent, he’ll listen to the audiobook, mindful that the lessons learned still apply six years after he discovered it.

“We need to have a way to let that mindset flourish in more Australian baseball players, and there’s no reason it’s not possible. That mindset flourishes in kids in the Dominican Republic, kids in Venezuela, kids in America, the ones that want it,” Bazzana said. “People believe in them, and they believe that they can go out and be the next [Francisco] Lindor or the next Jose Altuve or they have people to look to, whereas there’s not as many people to look to [in Australia].

“I have an opportunity to be someone that kids can look to and be like, I want to be like him, and I can be great. I don’t have to listen to the limits that someone’s going to put on me. It’s just an opportunity to change a narrative in the country and also make a place with a lot of resources a powerhouse. There’s no reason it can’t.”

Whether Bazzana goes to Cleveland with the first pick or Cincinnati with the second or Colorado with the third or Oakland with the fourth — his chances of falling any farther are minuscule — he’ll still be the highest Australian ever taken in the draft. (Pitcher Clayton Tanner, who moved to California from Australia as a 6-month-old, went in the third round in 2006.) The shift in Australians playing in college started with him, continues with his best friend, Stanford shortstop Jimmy Nati, and, Bazzana hopes, will endure with a generation who sees his tallest-poppy status in a good light.

It turns out that dreaming big can be a good thing, not a disappointment. That blending in is overrated. That there are benefits to paving a road not yet traveled. Bazzana is far from a finished product. He can find more tweaks in his swing as he adjusts to the quality of pitching in affiliated ball. He can clean up his diet. He is evermore hunting for ways to get the best sleep, including taping his mouth shut and wearing a nasal strip to help his breathing. He can one-up not just the next guy but himself.

And it all starts anew Sunday night.

“I am really excited for the draft and how that’ll be noticed,” Bazzana said. “Hopefully it opens some young kids’ minds that maybe one day they’ll be up on that stage. It’s those moments that you want to give people — moments to cherish and remember. I think back in my childhood — I remember watching Bryce Harper win the Home Run Derby, watching Usain Bolt run in the Olympics.

“There’s so many different things, but the draft is a chance to give people a moment of like, wow, I can do that, too.”