Culture
He's an Aussie schooled in cricket. And he might be the top pick in the MLB Draft
CORVALLIS, Ore. — In 1884, less than three decades after American miners introduced the sport to a new continent during the Victorian gold rush, an Australian made his professional baseball debut. Joe Quinn, born in a squatters’ camp outside of Ipswich, Queensland, years before his family immigrated to Iowa, suited up for the St. Louis Maroons of the United Association. Inauspiciously, the league folded after his first year. But it merged with the then-fledgling National League and Quinn appeared in 1,772 games for seven teams. One year, as a player-manager, he led the Cleveland Spiders to a total of 12 wins. He worked as a mortician in the offseason. He played his last game in the summer of 1901.
It would be 85 years before another Aussie set foot on a major-league diamond in the United States.
But a line that continued when Craig Shipley broke through with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1986 now stretches 38 men long. Three Australians have made major league All-Star teams. It is not a robust history comparable to, say, the Dominican Republic or Japan. But it’s something.
So it’s a little weird that nobody in the land of the “fair go” – an Australian ethos that, in part, emphasizes opportunity for all – assured Travis Bazzana he could do what nobody else has done.
“Why are there 1,000 kids in America that can go to these schools every year for baseball and I couldn’t do that?” says Bazzana, one of college baseball’s best hitters, sitting at a mezzanine picnic table inside Oregon State’s Goss Stadium this spring. “Because I’m from Australia? It doesn’t make sense. If I work towards being ready for that as a player, then it shouldn’t matter that I’m from Australia, and ‘Australians don’t do that.’”
On Sunday, Travis Bazzana will be the first Australian-born player selected in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft. If the consensus All-American second baseman doesn’t go No. 1 overall to the Cleveland Guardians, he likely won’t slip out of the top 5. A prospect who filled developmental gaps by playing cricket takes a massive step in changing a national paradigm. It’s a lot to process, for everyone else.
During his college recruiting visit, Bazzana took photos of the records on display in Oregon State’s recruiting lounge, to note the bars to surpass. He gave a presentation on induced vertical break and slider usage after studying them during the summer of 2022. He wears a nasal strip and tapes his mouth shut to maximize sleep and recovery. He envisions not only Olympic medals, but also the necessary infrastructure to earn them.
What’s next is not a mystery but a decision. Because he’s thought of everything. “I’m going to look for edges in all aspects of life, knowing it’s not just the five tools or going out here between the lines,” Bazzana says. “There’s so much more that goes into it. And I’m looking to be the best at those things. My ‘why’ leads to me caring a lot about being great at this. And being great is more than just doing what everyone else does.”
Once upon a time, a friend of Gary Bazzana’s asked Gary to join a local baseball team. Gary did and loved it. Years later, he introduced the sport to his three sons. The youngest was especially enthralled. “It was my identity from when I was pretty young,” Travis Bazzana says. He guesses he was 7 or 8 when he started logging on to MLB.com every day after school to study highlights of the day’s home runs, trying to understand what those swings looked like and how to recreate them. At age 10, his coach sent videos to officials in Williamsport, Pa., to prove Travis was worthy of an exemption to play up for a team seeking the country’s Little League World Series berth. At 15, he linked up with the Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League, the country’s top level of pro baseball. Bazzana hit a respectable .257 across three seasons competing against players twice his age.
He was the baseball kid, per local shorthand, in a country without many of them.
Eventually, videos and word of mouth about his makeup from people such as former major league pitcher and Australian Ryan Rowland-Smith made their way up the banks of the Willamette River. The Oregon State staff caught Bazzana during a showcase in Arizona in 2018 and offered a scholarship when Bazzana kited into town for that recruiting visit. And by the end of it all, Bazzana had set eight Oregon State career records, capped by a junior campaign in which he hit .407 and established new single-season standards for homers (28), runs (84), walks (76), total bases (195) and slugging percentage (.911).
Unprecedented. Unstoppable. Unbelievable. Australian. 🇦🇺
Sydney’s Travis Bazzana hit 2 homers today, setting the all-time Oregon State runs scored record.
He had 5 RBI today, 4 homers his last 2 games and 10 hits his last 3.
He could go 1st in the MLB draft. pic.twitter.com/sOm6rJIAkh
— Team Australia (@TeamAusBaseball) March 20, 2024
He’s played cricket and rugby and comes from the other side of the world. But this is a baseball story, not a bedtime story. “It’s always good when Australians can break some new ground,” says Liam Hendriks, the Boston Red Sox veteran righty and Perth native, who is one of the trio of Aussies to make an All-Star team. “Even being in the conversation (for No. 1 overall) will be great for Australian baseball.”
The trajectory makes sense – college program finds supremely gifted prospect overseas, said prospect delivers, professional franchise drafts him – but if it happened all the time for Australians, it would’ve happened already.
Bazzana is the outlier, because more has never been too much. “A lot of kids, no matter where they’re from, don’t have as clear of a picture of their goals that Bazz had,” Oregon State assistant coach Ryan Gipson says.
It was good fortune that Golden Jubilee Field, a park in the Sydney suburb of North Wahroonga, had batting cages and a pitching machine and was less than a 10-minute drive from home. A resource not widely available in Australia was available to Bazzana for hours and hours at a time … but that also required recognition of what being there for hours and hours, with his father feeding ball after ball into the machine, could do for him. “If I was struggling to hit the inside pitch, we’d do inside pitch,” Bazzana says, “and I’d get blown up in the cold night with a wood bat, over and over, until I could figure it out.” It allowed him to pile up repetitions, but not at the pace of peers in, say, the United States, where players might compete in three times as many games.
Fortunately, there was also cricket.
Another sport where a wood implement has to meet a small object moving with velocity and spin. And a heaping dose of urgency to connect: Record an out as a batsman, and you’re done for the entire match, left to stew on failure for hours. No surprise that Bazzana reluctantly recalls a game for the St. Ives Cricket Club in which he recorded a “golden duck” – cricket slang for scoring zero runs on the very first bowl. “You have to be able to lock in perfectly and have a plan for every ball,” he says now. “If you mess up, you’re done.”
The correlation is not accidental. “The hundreds of thousands of reps of more hand-eye coordination is directly applicable to being a great hitter in baseball,” says Oregon State assistant coach Joey Wong, who played overseas in Australia. “It’s really helped him become an elite manager of the strike zone. Being able to recognize pitches and where they start, where they’re going to end up. He’s become probably the best in the country at swing decisions.”
Bazzana was no remedial hitter when he set foot in a new country – he hit .429 with an OPS of 1.064 in 45 games with the Corvallis Knights of the collegiate West Coast League the summer before his freshman season – but neither was he fully formed in the box. “He hadn’t even learned to hit homers yet,” Oregon State head coach Mitch Canham says. (Bazzana hit one in 189 at-bats in that stretch.) Resources, though, would no longer be a problem at a program with 26 conference championships and three College World Series titles. And a glut of information and technology fed a baseball brain like a firehose filling a balloon that never pops.
Bazzana slugged .478 as a freshman and struck out 62 times in 302 plate appearances – neither a satisfactory figure – and then dove into 10 weeks of swing work and data analysis via motion capture and other tools at a Driveline Baseball facility in Seattle. He added 5 miles per hour to his bat speed, per Driveline, and created a flatter swing plane to better match pitches in the zone. The dingers went up (11 as a sophomore, 28 as a junior) and the whiffs went down (47 as a sophomore, 37 as a junior). “I think he actually keeps notes in his phone of how many times he chases out of the zone,” says Oregon State outfielder Micah McDowell, one of Bazzana’s roommates. “That day-to-day process with him is unbelievable, when a lot of guys get gooned out looking at that stuff.”
Canham describes Bazzana as “a walking TrackMan,” referencing the widely used program that measures ball trajectory, spin rates, release points and more. During a series at Washington State late in the 2024 season, Bazzana shook the weight off his bat in the on-deck circle and turned to the Oregon State dugout for a reminder. “Hey, what’s the horizontal break on his slider?” he yelled. There was a brief pause for incredulousness – the Beavers’ best hitter wanted that information now? – before someone barked out, “Fourteen!”
Bazzana shook his head and made his way to the box.
It’s not data. Not anymore. As Canham puts it, it’s his former star’s language. “I go up there with a clear, confident mind,” Bazzana says, “and a plan to battle that pitcher, whoever it is, every single time.” The capacity to process information with remarkable fluency has created what those around him consider to be Bazzana’s separating factor as a hitter: an ability to make swing adjustments in the sliver of time between pitches.
“Some guys it’s weekend-to-weekend or game-to-game,” Canham says. “I always thought the good ones are at-bat-to-at-bat, getting back in it. But he’s very much so pitch-to-pitch. He’s always going to hit.”
Meanwhile, the consumption became all-consuming. Anyone in Bazzana’s orbit felt the pull of his research, insights and innovations. “The running joke is, if you’re his roommate, your OPS is going to go up 200 points,” Gipson says. It was after that summer at Driveline that Bazzana made the PowerPoint presentation on induced vertical break to the rest of the Oregon State squad. During workouts, Bazzana would catch sight of pitchers working in the bullpen and drift off to discuss what he sees. In-depth discussions about pitch shape or usage or defensive alignments behind the mound were basically a weekly occurrence, at least, per Oregon State starter Aiden May. “There are a lot of talented guys, there’s a lot of focused guys, there’s a lot of people who are very naturally skilled,” May says. “But not a lot of guys who are that can affect the rest of the people around them quite like Travis can.”
There was also Bazzana’s pursuit of a cold tub to install in the garage of his off-campus residence – rendered moot when Oregon State added one to its facility. Or the steaks and fish he’ll prepare for himself and his roommates, in alignment with best nutritional practices. Or the presentation he delivered to the team last fall entitled “Champion Habits,” focused on sleep and recovery and general discipline. Hence the nasal strip and taped-shut mouth and white noise machine in bed at night … and why McDowell, his roommate, picked up the practices. “It’s super contagious,” McDowell says. “I’ve never played with anyone in any sport that just is so driven and is constantly thinking about how to better himself.”
When Bazzana arrived at Oregon State, fully invested in creating the best opportunity to reach the majors, he thought kinesiology would be a worthy major. Learn about the body and how and why it moves like it does, and all that. Then he discovered he’d be sidetracked by requirements such as a chemistry course he had no use for, so he made another adjustment. He chose psychology. Learning about the brain and relationships and people, he figured, would bring out more in himself and everyone around him.
There have been no false steps to this coming Sunday, which is remarkable given how long the path has been. But then there’s only ever been one thought behind every one of those steps.
“Someone’s gotta be the best,” Bazzana says. “Why are they the best? And how can I do that?”
Travis Bazzana’s capacity to process information has created what many consider to be his separating factor as a hitter: an ability to make swing adjustments between pitches. (Jeff Moreland / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
In five World Baseball Classics, Australia has won five games. Its last run was a minor breakthrough: three victories and a quarterfinal appearance in 2023. It took home an Olympic silver medal two decades ago – the only time Australia left the Summer Games with a winning record – and then failed to qualify for the next two before the sport was entirely removed from the event slate.
A country that takes up 5.2 percent of the earth’s landmass is, in this specific context, not overly noticeable.
The best baseball prospect Australia has produced thinks about everything, but maybe the future of the game in his home country most deeply. Bazzana envisions medaling in international competitions to confirm Australia’s place as a power in the sport. On a smaller scale, it’s spearheading efforts to improve the training environments and coaching to bring them up to standard, so those who want the resources will have them. He doesn’t know exactly how it will work, being in the United States and affecting change 16 hours away. He just says he’ll find a way to figure it out.
But the want-to is not as powerful without credibility behind it. That’s the meaning of Sunday, whenever his name is called.
Travis Bazzana, the baseball kid from Australia, will be one of the first of more than 600 prospects selected by major league franchises. It could be anyone else in the world, and it’s one of their own. And what comes next could be anything.
“At the stem of it,” Bazzana says, “it’s belief.”
— The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Jeff Moreland / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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