While making it to the MLB is at the top of Luke Berryhill's to-do list, he might produce a chart-topping country song before he gets there.
Berryhill, a minor league catcher in the Houston Astros organization,— was recently featured in a Sports Illustrated profile that reveals the baseball player's double life as a country music singer. In the piece, Berryhill, who finished the 2023 season with the Triple-A Sugar Land Space Cowboys, explains how his music career began while rehabbing a torn labrum that he suffered during the 2021 baseball season. In the midst of a grueling post-operation recovery process, Berryhill felt he needed an outlet for all the emotions he was experiencing — so he wrote a song.
"I literally just wrote my life," Berryhill said. "It just flowed out."
That song became "Road to the Show," a country ballad about the grind of minor league baseball. Berryhill was going to perform it Tuesday night as part of a set he planned to play at the MLB Players Trust's annual Playmakers Classic fundraiser in Las Vegas.
Although Berryhill began making music in 2021, it wasn't until 2022 when the minor leaguer's double life began to attract interest from record labels.
After he knocked a pregame rendition of the national anthem out of the park in May 2022 (which he sang in his catcher's gear, before going 3-for-5 and scoring the game-winning run), an executive at Nashville's Banner Music publishing company offered to have Berryhill write and record a few songs in Nashville once the baseball season ended. Berryhill accepted, recorded a couple songs with Banner Music last year, and hopes those songs — one of which is his debut single, "Dance on It," which is also his walk-out song — can kickstart his career in the music industry.
While Berryhill — who played college baseball at the University of South Carolina and was drafted in 2019 by the Cincinnati Reds — has always loved music and knew he had a good voice, he never expected music to become a potential career path.
"It's just seeing another side of myself," Berryhill said in the Sports Illustrated article. "My whole life, I've always been strictly a baseball player ... It's been cool seeing what I can come up with on the artistic side as well and exploring another talent."
While Berryhill's focus is still on his baseball future, making music has now become a sort of side hustle that could turn into something much more. Perhaps all it will take is a grand slam performance at Tuesday night's MLB Vegas fundraiser for Berryhill to skyrocket up the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
