Cleveland Guardians' Travis Bazzana saw an uptick in power toward the end of the 2025 minor league season.
Travis Bazzana may not have made his MLB debut with the Cleveland Guardians in 2025, but that doesn’t mean it was a completely lost season for the No. 1 overall pick of the 2024 MLB Draft.
Between a stint on the injured list with an oblique strain and a promotion to Triple-A towards the end of the season, Bazzana showed development in one key area that should have the Guardians encouraged about his overall ceiling as a big-league player: power.
Before Bazzana’s oblique injury, he was having a fine season with a slash line of .252/.362/.433 through the first 33 games of the minor league season.
Then, after Bazzana recovered from the oblique injury, he finished the year on a high note, lighting up Triple-A pitching while showing an uptick in his power, too. In the final two weeks of the season logged a slugging percentage of .500 and an OPS of .879.
From the jump from Double-A to Triple-A, Bazzana saw a jump in his slugging percentage from .426 to .438. That may only feel like a small increase, but when you factor in how much better the pitching is from each level, it makes the increase in slug feel much more impressive.
During Bazzana’s stint at Triple-A, he registered an average exit velocity of 89.3 mph, a max exit velocity of 109.2 mph, and a hard hit rate of 39.7 percent.
Coming out of college, Bazzana was known more for his contact ability rather than his in-game power, but now he’s starting to show a little bit more pop in his swing as the 23-year-old inches closer to his MLB debut.
Do these stats mean that Bazzana will end up being a 30-home-run type player at the big-league level? Probably not. The left-hander's outlook is still contact-oriented, with a focus on finding gaps and collecting doubles.
However, the Guardians should at least beast encouraged by the progress and growth Bazzana has made since entering the organization a year and a half ago. Even though Bazzana has missed some time due to injury, he remains the top prospect in Cleveland’s farm system for a reason, and this uptick in power is just one example of that.