The Note on His Phone

While he was still in college, as MLB.com reported this spring, Travis Bazzana kept a note on his phone with a lineup in it. Australia's lineup, for a World Baseball Classic three years away that he had no guarantee of playing in. He'd written his own name at the top. The manager he'd penciled in was Dave Nilsson.

In March, at the Tokyo Dome, Australia opened the tournament against Chinese Taipei and Bazzana homered in the seventh. Australia won 3-0. The manager in the dugout was Dave Nilsson.

Four months later he was at Citizens Bank Park, coming off the bench in the sixth inning of an All-Star Game to play second base, twelve weeks into his major-league life. He went 0-for-2. The players had voted him in.

As a kid he'd watched All-Star highlights around his class schedule, because the games happen in the middle of a Sydney school day.

Nilsson was an All-Star in 1999. Between that summer and this one, no Australian position player had played in one.

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He's from Hornsby, north of Sydney, and he went to Turramurra High and came up through the Ku-ring-gai clubs. He played for the Sydney Blue Sox from 2018 to 2021, which means he was playing professional baseball against grown men while he was still in school.

Australia has no draft. To become draftable he had to leave, so he went to Oregon State, and in 2024 he hit .407 with a .568 on-base percentage and led the Pac-12 in all six of average, on-base, slugging, home runs, walks and runs. In April he broke Jim Wilson's school record of 21 homers, set in 1982, and kept going until he had 28.

Cleveland took him first overall that July and signed him for $8.95 million. No Australian had ever gone first in an American draft.

Then he got hurt twice in one season, on opposite sides — a right oblique at Double-A Akron that cost him two months, a left one at Columbus in September that ended his year. He played 84 games across Akron, Columbus and the complex league, and hit .245 with a .389 on-base percentage, which is the shape he has now, only more so.

Cleveland called him up on April 28, twenty-one months after drafting him.

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He's hitting .238.

He's also on base at .336, which is ninety-eight points of daylight between what he bats and what he reaches at, built on thirty-eight walks in seventy-three games. He's stolen fifteen bases. Weighted for park and league, he's been about ten percent better than the average major-league hitter this year.

A .238 hitter who's ten percent above average is not a contradiction. He's a player whose value shows up where batting average doesn't look.

He made the other half of the case himself, the day the rosters came out.

"I feel like there's been ups and downs," he told reporters on July 5. "I feel like I haven't been the most consistent version of myself, but to get the nod when I feel like there's a lot left in the tank was really cool ... So I was kind of speechless."

He turns twenty-four in August. He's been a major leaguer for three months, and the league has spent most of them learning him.

Early on, pitchers threw him fastballs nearly sixty percent of the time, and he hit .311 in May and did most of that damage on four-seamers and sinkers. Then they stopped. By mid-July, per Pitcher List, fewer than half the pitches he saw were fastballs.

The rest followed. By FanGraphs' monthly splits he struck out 19.5 percent of the time in May. In June he hit .189. In July, .217, with the strikeouts up to 25.3. Over his last thirty-five games before the break he hit under .200 — and his expected average, which reads his contact quality rather than his luck, was .178. A hitter running .190 with a .240 expected average is unlucky. A hitter running .190 with a .178 is being pitched correctly.

Which means the season figures have May inside them. The .336, the ten percent — not a competing frame. A stale one.

Except for the walks.

In May, hitting .311, he walked in 11.0 percent of his plate appearances. In July, hitting .217 against a diet of breaking balls, he walked in 13.3. His on-base percentage in the worst stretch of his professional life was .337 — a hundred and twenty points above his average, and one point off his season mark.

They took away what he did in May. They haven't taken what was underneath it.

The glove's been worse. He came into the break four outs below average at second base, fifteenth percentile among fielders, and on June 29 against Minnesota he booted a Kody Clemens ground ball. Second base is where Cleveland needs him and it isn't yet where he's best.

Cards have an opinion too, and the opinion is about the headline. Our own tracker had his Bowman Draft refractor near $155 as of July 23, up about eight percent on the week. That's what a first-overall pedigree and an All-Star selection do to a price.

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Nilsson caught and played the corners for Milwaukee from 1992 to 1999, all eight of his seasons with the one club, and in that last summer he became the first Australian ever to appear in an All-Star Game. Then he left. He was a free agent that winter and didn't sign anywhere, because he wanted to play for Australia at the 2000 Olympics and couldn't do both.

He manages the national team now. Which is how he came to be standing in a dugout in Tokyo watching a 23-year-old homer in the seventh inning of the opening game of a World Baseball Classic.

Australia lost a tiebreaker to Korea and went out in the pool stage. Bazzana took it hard enough that his manager noticed. "Because he didn't come here for himself," Nilsson told reporters afterward. "He came here for Australia."

Asked in July what he'd tell the kids at home, Bazzana talked about the clock. "If you want to go do something cool, aim for it, because you've got a lot of time ... and then this stuff starts to become reality if you stick to it."

Australia has produced four major-league All-Stars. Two were relievers, one is Nilsson, and one is a second baseman who's hitting .238 and seeing a steady diet of sliders while he works out what to do about it.