Driveline Baseball -

Travis Bazzana was in an unfamiliar position: he was pressing.

He was not in the lineup early in the second game of a doubleheader on Sept. 4, rather he was given a physical - and perhaps more important - mental breather.

But he was not on the bench with his arms draped over the dugout railing. Rather, he was in the cage, in the depths of Progressive Field, with assistant hitting coach Dan Puente. He was searching. He was looking to recapture a feeling.

In practice sessions, he had just begun experimenting with a slight barrel tip in his load - the small move in which a hitter's wrists break, and the barrel moves forward toward the plate to trigger a swing. Gary Sheffield had an iconic extreme version. Bazzana's experimental version was modest. He had picked up on a bat waggle he liked while studying a minor leaguer on a home-run binge. He tested it in the cage.

"My ball flight in the cage felt really good, and I was like, 'OK, this is kind of clicking,'" Bazzana said.

A few innings later he was summoned to pinch hit.

Bazzana stepped into the left-handed box with Cleveland down two runs in the eighth, a runner on. Detroit's Jacob Waguespack rocked and fired, unleashing a 94-mph fastball. Bazzana waggled the bat with his leg kick, got off an A-swing, and drove the ball high into the Cleveland night. He took a few side steps out of the box to his right, admiring the ball flight, with his bat's barrel pointed down to the ground. It was as if he had just slayed some beast - maybe a psychological one.

He wasn't done. Two innings later, he produced a walk-off single off Kenley Jansen in a 4-3 win, mobbed by his teammates.

"I've kind of ridden that since," said Bazzana, who slashed .280/.365/.613 in September.

The night ushered in a September turnaround for Bazzana and the Guardians. The journey that preceded it was perhaps as important. Every hitter is going to fall into slumps. What Bazzana learned - with a little help - is how to recognize one sooner, and climb out faster.

"I wouldn't say it's so simple, but just not letting yourself get away from what you do well," Bazzana said.

The slide - mental and physical

In July and August, his swing decisions drifted.

Pitchers were throwing him more stuff away, a weak spot, and he struggled to adjust.

"I felt like I had a stretch throughout July and August where I was swinging at pitch tunnels that, when I'm good, I don't really swing at," he said.

The drift showed up in the data. His chase rate climbed. He swung at too many pitches out of the zone, and in areas where he struggled, and too few in areas where he does damage.

His out-of-zone swing rate spiked to a then season-high of 29%, while his in-zone rate dropped to a season low of 60%. As a result, his strikeout rate reached a season-worst 26% in July.

And by expanding what pitches he offered at, the quality of his swings declined.

His fast-swing rate dropped to 10.1 percent. He was losing the ability to isolate the pitch locations where his best swing showed up.

Bazzana is one of the more process-oriented hitters in the sport, but even for him the scoreboard is loud. Batting averages and other performance measures sit in enormous digital type. The temptation is to make something happen.

"I felt like I got a little erratic and was going after everything early in the count," he said. "I know that's not the way I'm going to sustain success, but it's hard when you're out there not to let those things creep in. You subconsciously just want to chase a hit."

The approach problem was connected to a swing problem, the mental bled into the physical, and vice versa.

Poor posture and timing produced rolled-over grounders or popups.

In August he saw 333 pitches and produced more ground balls than fly balls. He did not homer that month and posted a 13.6% infield-fly rate.

Little changes to his kinetic chain became large flight path misses.

"At times, my load got empty this year," he said. "It's like I'm crunched up and nothing's really even loaded. I'm not really using the ground as well as I could. ... All I can do from there is kind of come out of that posture in all different ways. ...

"You get more extreme steepness, or an uphill path, when it's not working and you're not perfectly timed up."

A negative flywheel formed. 

One problem began feeding another. He was moving poorly, so his swing suffered. As the quality of his contact deteriorated, he chased more. The more he chased, the farther he moved from the approach that had made him successful.

And the worse the results became, the harder it was to simply wait for the swing to come back.

The good news? He had help.

In-season repair

Bazzana is in almost daily contact with Tanner Stokey, Driveline's director of hitting, who has worked with him since his first assessment there.

The Guardians' hitting staff works with him every day, of course, including Conner Watson, a former Driveline instructor. The organizations share similar language and beliefs.

Stokey's most important contribution may not have been a drill or a cue. It was familiarity.

"He just knows what I do when I am going well, extremely well," Bazzana said.

Our coaches' conversations with players don't end with the conclusion of the offseason. They continue into the season whether with a No. 1 overall pick like Bazzana, or a junior college success story in Michael Clarkson.

That baseline of understanding let Stokey see where Bazzana drifted from the patterns that made him good - and he also saw a rookie season wearing on him in ways the data and box scores could not illuminate.

Stokey described Bazzana's default intensity as impossibly high.

"He's the type of guy whose idle runs really hot at all times, 150% intensity," Stokey said. "The bigger the moment, the better he is."

There is a cost to operating that way, though, especially as a rookie making the adjustment to life in the majors. And that's in addition to being the face of baseball for a country, his native Australia. There were more interviews, signings, and endorsement work piled onto learning how to manage the travel and grind of a major league season.

In the middle of the season he also spent more time on defense and less time in the weight room than someone with his profile typically would. He only had so many hours in the day. Bat speed that had been built over multiple seasons began to slip. His average bat speed fell to 69.8 mph in August, a season low.

"He started to lose the capacity to swing fast," Stokey said. "Some of it was mechanical, some of it was physical."

The issues compounded.

When he was not moving well, he could not swing fast. When he tried to force speed, he had a harder time controlling the barrel. Chase rose. Contact quality became weaker.

When the Guardians were in St. Petersburg, Fla. in late July to play the Rays, Bazzana crossed the bay to visit Driveline's Tampa facility.

Stokey and Jacob Hirsh had met with him in Arizona a few weeks earlier and thought they had started to make progress. In Tampa, they assessed him again in the lab.

"We tried to get the swing back under control, figure out where he was, and started making small changes," Stokey said. "Obviously, that's not going to happen immediately. We took that data, put a plan together, and kept iterating as we moved forward.

"With him it all stems from the lower body - how he uses the ground when he loads. A lot of times if he's not loading into his rear leg well enough, he'll hike his front leg too high with a really big leg kick. His pelvis angles laterally; the front side of his pelvis hikes really high, like a dog on a fire hydrant. I consider that a false load - a fake sense of stability. From that position he has to compensate during the forward move."

The diagnosis was becoming clear. And to help create a prescription to address the lull they leaned into an advantage today that curious hitters and coaches have in slump-busting that previous generations did not: an avalanche of data.

Margin for error

Bazzana and his coaches had Statcast tracking, Driveline swing models, force-plate testing, and the Guardians' in-game biomechanics.

They could compare the slumping Bazzana against the best version of himself.

The data showed changes in his rear-knee flexion and the way his hips were working. Force-plate testing showed that his strength and physical output had dipped.

This was not simply a problem with swing shape. His body was moving differently. He had lost some capacity to create energy.

The solution was not to build a new swing.

It was to gain some strength back.

It was to give his existing swing more room to work.

One adjustment was almost comically small.

Bazzana had been struggling to cover the outer half. In July, he stood about 27 inches from the plate. By September, he was at 25.2 inches.

Less than two inches.

The adjustment effectively brought the outside corner closer to the middle-away part of the plate, giving him a better chance to cover the outer half without sacrificing his ability to hunt pitches inside and drive them to his pull side.

That was a change in his initial stance.

The next change also came early in his swing sequence: the barrel tip.

Stokey had spoken with him about looser hands, better rhythm and allowing the barrel to work differently in the load. Bazzana found a version of the feel while watching video of a minor leaguer on a home-run binge.

The waggle helped to a better path.

"The tip is helping how I enter and then helping me hold my path through contact, versus having it flatter under the plane and flipping off," Bazzana said. "What it feels like is that I'm at an attack angle and a horizontal angle that works for a longer period of time.

"There's a wider range of contact points where the angles I'm moving at can sustain success and good ball flight."

He had lost some adjustability in his swing, or margin for error. When his movement and path improved, the window widened.

That gave Bazzana something else back: the ability to trust his approach. The physical bled into the mental.

"I can trust myself to get deep in counts because, if I'm moving right, I'm not going to miss, and I shouldn't chase," he said. "I can get deep in counts, get walks, and wait for the pitcher to miss into my successful slugging areas.

"My bread and butter is that I'm going to be a tough out. You're going to have to come into the zone, generally."

By being in a better place he could get pitchers to be in a worse one: in the zone.

His best stretch of play coincides with his highest rate of swings in the zone.

Walks are part of that identity, but so is the threat behind them. He wants to get deep into counts not as passivity, but because the longer he stays on his plan, the more likely a pitcher is to miss into a damage zone.

There is some Joey Votto in the idea: hitting as a way of manipulating the pitcher into the pitch you want. Votto compared the approach to that of a boxer's. The aim is not to eliminate failure. A pitcher can still paint a corner. The aim is to be stubborn enough with the process that when the mistake arrives, it does not pass by.

"The more you can understand where you have success, and then be the best at not missing when you get those chances, the better," Bazzana said. "I think I'm moving better. I'm in better positions to deliver the barrel."

As confidence and approach returned, he got off more A-swings, and the number rose. He was finding his way out when he was summoned off the bench on Sept. 4.

The flywheel now spun in a positive direction.

Small things

Player-development stories are often framed as dramatic reinventions: a new path, a new grip, a step-change in exit velocity.

Stokey tends to think in smaller increments.

"More often than not, player development is just small changes around the margins. You do that repeatedly over time and it compounds."
Tanner Stokey, Driveline director of hitting

That is Bazzana's 2026 story.

There was not one broken piece. His physical capacity dipped. His load became less efficient. His posture changed. The barrel path became less adjustable. Swing decisions grew more aggressive and less focused. The desire to get a hit pulled him away from the process that gave him the best chance to get one.

There was not one fix, either: physical work, mechanical adjustment, better information, a move two inches closer to the plate, a barrel waggle, a more useful load, and a return to selective aggression.

It wasn't creating a new hitter. It was getting Bazzana to the best version of himself.

All hitters face slumps every season. The next time his chase rate climbs, he knows what that can mean. The next time his load feels empty, he has a better idea of what to check. The next time the barrel enters poorly, he has a cue that can point him back toward a movement he recognizes. And when results tempt him to abandon the plan, he has a simpler question.

"It's like, 'OK, what do I do well? This is where I do damage,'" Bazzana said.

That may be the useful residue of the slump: not that he discovered a way to avoid one. No hitter does. He learned how to reduce the duration of the next one.