A kid from Sydney’s upper north shore is tipped to become the top pick in the MLB draft and pocket a whopping $15 million signing bonus. Now he wants to make Australians care about baseball.
A former Major League Baseball pitcher for the Seattle Mariners, who plucked him out of Australia 24 years ago, Rowland-Smith still lives in Seattle, works for the MLB Network as a media analyst and runs a junior academy, NxtGen Baseball, on the side. NxtGen operates tours where talented young players from Australia travel to America for a taste of the big time. Like 12-year-old Travis Bazzana, who went on the 2016 trip.
“I’ve been around a bunch of alphas, some of the best players on the planet, and they have something different where they just ... you can’t look away. And he had that.” “It’s been a big change since I sort of reached a level where the expectations go greater, and the draft hype got much greater in the US,” Bazzana told this masthead.
“I was reading, watching YouTube videos of training and coaches and interviews and as much as I could find about any Major League players for hours ... I was just obsessed with athletic training and how I could make myself faster, and I’d watch Usain Bolt running clips for hours, just trying to become a better athlete and a better baseball player, and I was obsessed with it and was trying to find any resource and edge I could. I still am, to this day.
Australia’s tiny baseball footprint was actually a blessing. It meant he was exposed to competition against adults at a younger age, including against professionals in the Australian Baseball League, where he briefly featured for the Sydney Blue Sox. And because the community was so small, he was able to connect fairly easily with ex-pros, work under them and heed to their advice. There are 38 Australians to have played at least one game in MLB, and Bazzana has probably met a dozen of them.
At age 16, Bazzana reckons he was a good baseballer, but nothing special. Now he is being talked about as a generational talent, a hitting machine who has developed at a faster rate than his peers in the last couple of years and shot up MLB teams’ draft boards.
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