PowerPoints and a leaky air mattress: Inside Travis Bazzana's journey to the majors

CLEVELAND — Travis Bazzana doesn’t remember a cot.“I’m going to be dead honest,” he said. “The mattress I slept on never changed.”Ryan Rowland-Smith insists Bazzana’s memory is foggy.“He claims he was on an air mattress the whole time,” Rowland-Smith said. “I’m telling you, he wasn’t.”In the summer of 2022, Bazzana crashed for about 10 weeks in the spare downstairs bedroom at the Rowland-Smith residence in the Seattle area. Rowland-Smith, his longtime mentor and fellow Australian, swears that after a week, he replaced the air mattress with a cot. Bazzana contends that Rowland-Smith is confusing his situation with another instance in which an Australian left-handed pitcher stayed at his house.Advertisement