Travis Bazzana’s greatest strength? Self-awareness: Why that matters and what that looks like as he takes his game to the next level

In some ways, he is not much different from his junior star Jose Ramírez, who always enjoyed strong communication skills, and learned to improve the flight of the ball.

To reach that ceiling, he has a few strengths: self-awareness.

He identifies and accepts areas where he needs to grow and improve, and attacks them. He is passionate about the Hows and Whys of the craft. His baseball makeup is rare among the great players Driveline coaches work with. What does that look like? Driveline hit director Tanner Stokey has a favorite anecdote.

In the summer of 2022, Stokey received a call from Bazzana’s agent at the time, David O’Hagan, of Excel Sports Management.

Coming off an All-American freshman season at Oregon State, Bazzana was invited to play in the Cape Cod League, a wood-bat circuit where college stars try to raise their level. Every player accepts that golden ticket. Former Driveline hitting coach Andrew Aydt can’t remember anyone ever turning them down.

Yes, there is a first for everything. There is Travis Bazzana.

“He called me toward the end of his freshman year at Oregon State,” Stokey said. “The first thing he told me was, ‘You’re going to want to hire this kid one day.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

O’Hagan then explained that Bazzana wanted to train at Driveline instead of playing in Cape Town.

Sorry, thought Stokey.

“At the time, I thought it was crazy not to play in Cape Town – if there was a summer league I was going to play in,” said Stokey. “But Trav knows himself well enough to know he’s probably going to be a first-round pick (one day), if he’s not very close to it, and he wanted to find ways to be as valuable and productive as possible.”

Bazzana became aware of Driveline in Australia because Baseball Australia had a relationship with our company. Bazzana got his hands on bat-speed coaching from former MLB player Glenn Williams, now CEO of Baseball Australia, and followed the Driveline bat-speed protocol.

“I lost my energy,” said Bazzana about the batting coaches.

As a youngster, Bazzana played with the Ku-Ring-Gai Stealers club on Sydney’s North Shore. Although he didn’t have access to football and soccer tracking technology at the time, he wanted a data-based feedback loop to guide his progress. To monitor bat-speed progress, Bazzana hit the ball in the spartan cages of the Ring-Gai Stealers while his father tracked the ball’s speed with a radar app on his smartphone.

He was like Driveline before he joined the Kent, Wash., facility.

“I think it just came from the fact that I always wanted to know why,” said Bazzana. “That was important to me. So, if there’s a number that gives me a definite answer or a thought, I always look at that, and I look at the edge.”

Bazzana developed a belief that he still holds: playing in games raises a player’s level, but coaching skills raise a player’s ceiling.

“If you play every day, it’s very difficult to make the necessary adjustments to change the ceiling,” said Bazzana. “Changing your roof comes from changing power output, and adjusting to big swings. There’s an adjustment to how you change your roof, which can come from game testing, and playing in games, and realizing, ‘Oh, I just need to change when I’m looking for spots.’

“But I think quality offseason training is where people change how good they can be, or, how good they can be, especially at a young age.”

That basic belief was established in Australia, but he still believed it when he weighed what to do in his summer before his sophomore year.

“I remember talking to my hitting coach at Oregon State, Ryan Gipson, in the airport during my freshman year,” Bazzana recalled. “I had this opportunity to play in Cape Town, I had two seasons before I was eligible to go to the army, so it was like, ‘Do I want to play twice?’ I felt like I had room for improvement and an opportunity to use that time. I outlined what I thought I could work on, and what the training would look like. (Oregon State) trusted what I was planning to do because I had confidence.”

So, instead of doing what every other young American did when he was offered a ticket to Cape Town, Bazzana went to Driveline.

For 10 weeks, six days a week that summer, he worked with Stokey, Aydt – now with the Nationals – and others.

“We spent that offseason trying to get his bat speed up and improve his ball flight to the side of the field,” Stokey said. “But what we ended up doing in the end was cleaning up his bat technique, and his posture, with all the details of biomechanics.”

When he returned to Corvallis as a sophomore, his production jumped across the board.

His home run total nearly doubled from 6 to 11. His OPS increased from .903 to 1.222, and his on-base mark jumped to .500.

The positional changes have not only helped his swing characteristics but his selection at the plate, which has now become a signature feature. He has an elite 13% walk rate in the majors.

“The biggest changes were the setup, the postural (matter), which affected my approach,” said Bazzana. “So, my velocity jumped right up when I was able to do that, because, I was actually using the power that I had, the power that I had. It also helped my swing decisions because I was taller… I felt like I could see (pitches) better early, which meant I didn’t rush too much in the dirt. That’s when my swing decisions started to show up again. There were a lot of things that came to me over the summer. How to be a better offensive player.”

In his first summer with Driveline, he created a better foundation for his swing.