Bazzana has a chat with ... cricket idol?

This story was excerpted from Mandy Bell’s Guardians Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

When front offices are scouting high school and college players, they have tons of video to look at. Sometimes, if an athlete plays another sport, they’ll have some clips of him playing basketball or football. But rarely does a team have to dig into cricket videos.

The Guardians covered their bases when they were getting to know Travis Bazzana, who’d eventually become their No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft. Not only did they know everything he did on the field while he was playing at Oregon State and in high school in Australia, they had eyes on how he did in his cricket games.

Bazzana was a multisport athlete. He didn’t mind picking up a tennis racket and hitting tennis balls. Bazzana's mom would bowl him cricket balls in the backyard. He’d go to a park and kick around a soccer ball or play touch rugby with his friends. It just so happened to be baseball that spoke to Bazzana the most. But that didn’t mean other sports weren’t important to him.

In the same way that he had baseball idols, Bazzana had cricket idols, and one of them was Pat Cummins, who hopped on a call to congratulate Bazzana on being the first Australian-born player to be taken as the top pick in the MLB Draft.

“It’s insane talking to you here, because I just grew up watching cricket my whole life,” Bazzana said.

Cummins and Jake Fraser-McGurk, a teammate of his on the San Francisco Unicorns, sat on the other end of the call, asking questions of the new Clevelander. The first being: Did you really play cricket and baseball simultaneously?

“Baseball and cricket were always my two main sports growing up,” Bazzana explained. “It was backyard [cricket] with my mom and my dad and my friends. … And then I started playing like actual team-representative cricket at like 10 [years old]. But I played baseball that whole time.

“I sort of knew that baseball was my passion and what I wanted to do. But I really enjoyed cricket and a lot of my best mates played cricket. So I did that, and then once it got a little more serious at 16, when you start thinking about moving to the U.S. and the best kind of path forward, I had to kind of chill on cricket. But I still played Shires [cricket competition] when I was like 17, kind of right before I moved to the U.S.”

As the 2019 ICC International Cricketer of the Year, the next question was obvious for Cummins, since there are two different swings: Did you look like a baseball player instead of a cricketer?

“I looked like a cricketer for the most part,” Bazzana said with a grin. “I wasn’t the best straight bat. If a cricket batting coach watched me when I was 16, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, he’s alright. But you know, his bat could get a little straighter. [It] could be more forward over the ball.’ But I definitely had a little more elevation in my game than like a pure batsman.”

It was clear that Cummins was Bazzana’s cricket hero growing up, so the question of favorite cricketer did not need to be asked. However, the pair of Unicorns teammates decided to ask Bazzana which Major League players he admires from afar.

“Watching Aaron Judge hit is always something,” Bazzana said. “But I’d say like the athleticism of Bobby Witt Jr., he’ll run and he looks like he’s a gazelle. If you’re talking like presence – you know how some guys just, on a sporting field, have a presence that’s like powerful and they have so much confidence – Juan Soto, when he’s hitting, has this presence. And you’ll see it, and he looks like he’s going to succeed and do great.”

Bazzana is just beginning his professional baseball career. He’s played in eight games for the High-A Lake County Captains and hasn’t really found his stride yet (although, he already has a grand slam under his belt).

Baseball has always been in Bazzana's blood and the Guardians have no doubts that he’ll thrive the more he plays this season and beyond – no matter what level he’s playing at. But Cummins wants to make sure Bazzana remembers where he came from. So he invited Bazzana to practice with him when he’s back in his home country.

“I’d have to have a practice net the day before,” Bazzana said, laughing. “I’d be so rusty.”