The Singing Catcher: How Minor Leaguer Luke Berryhill Balances Baseball and Music Careers

Five years into his professional baseball career, Berryhill now spends his down time on stage at gigs or in the recording studio after discovering a new creative outlet.

After the end of the 2021 season, Luke Berryhill had surgery to repair a torn labrum. The minor-league catcher had played through the injury for most of the year—he’d finished the season in the Astros’ farm system at Double-A Corpus Christi—and now faced the unpleasant realities of any recovery process. Pain. Uncertainty. Boredom. Time alone in a hotel.

So he decided to write a song.

“I literally just wrote my life,” Berryhill says. “It just flowed out.”

The spark was the downtime after surgery. But the inspiration was everything about the grind of minor league baseball: ”the bus trips, the good games and bad games, working your way up,” Berryhill says. He continued to tinker with it over the coming months and ultimately titled it “Road to the Show.” And he will perform it tonight as part of a set he’ll play at the MLB Players Trust’s annual Playmakers Classic fundraiser in Las Vegas.

This is just one of the gigs he’ll play this offseason. But it will be perhaps the most fitting—one bringing together his twin careers as baseball player and country singer.

Berryhill has continued working his way through the Astros’ system and finished this season with the Triple-A Sugar Land Space Cowboys. He’s also begun pursuing country music. Last winter, Berryhill wrote and recorded a few songs with Banner Music in Nashville, which he hopes can be the start of a future in the industry. He dropped his debut single, “Dance on It,” this summer.

And, yes, he used it as his walk-up song.

“It’s just seeing another side of myself,” Berryhill says. “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.”

Berryhill played college ball at the University of South Carolina and was drafted in 2019 by the Reds. He was traded to the Astros in January ‘21. (He was named the Astros’ minor league Player of the Year that October and was honored on the field at Minute Maid Park during the team’s playoff run that fall—even though he’d been playing with that torn labrum.) But the last few years have seen him tap into another passion.

The catcher grew up around music. Both his father, Larry Berryhill, and his uncle, Kurt Lee Wheeler, are musicians, and he “grew up going to concerts almost every weekend,” he says. He’d long enjoyed singing and playing the guitar. But he never planned on trying to make a potential career in music.

Berryhill has sang the national anthem before games before, and has released two singles on Spotify :: Rich Storry/USA TODAY Sports

That changed last year. The Corpus Christi Caller Times wrote a story on Berryhill in June 2022 after he gave a standout performance: He sang the national anthem in his catcher’s gear before going 3-for-5 and scoring the game-winning run. (The day in question was also his 24th birthday.) That attracted the notice of an executive at Banner Music. The publishing company offered to bring him out to write and record a few songs in Nashville—after the baseball season had ended, of course, when he had the time.

“In the writers’ room, I thought it was going to be so serious, like planning a war strategy or something,” Berryhill says with a laugh. “But it’s just a bunch of good people having a good time.”

Even with his family background in music, Berryhill found the experience revealing. This was a side of the industry he’d never experienced before. The process here was a far cry from just him and his guitar in a hotel room, where he’d been only a year prior, writing “Road to the Show.” This was much more professionalized: “I was pretty nervous going into the writing sessions,” Berryhill says. “But now I’ve fallen in love with it.” The experience was, in a sense, not so different from what he was familiar as a baseball player: Diving into a passion to see the business underneath.

His teammates had already known he could sing. Berryhill would sometimes bring his guitar in the clubhouse, and he’d sung the national anthem at games several times, including once at major league spring training this year. (That one earned him a fist bump from Astros manager Dusty Baker.) But recording those songs last winter—and dropping them over the following months—brought a whole new kind of attention. “Everyone’s been super supportive,” Berryhill says. A few opposing players even complimented him on the walk-up song.

Berryhill is still focused on baseball. But music is an ideal way for him to spend the offseason. He’s found a sound he likes, not so different from the ‘90s and early ‘00s country he grew up on, with a few nods to tradition. (“I just love the sound of a steel guitar and a fiddle,” he says.) He’ll play a few more gigs over the winter, living in his hometown of Canton, Ga., using lessons he’s taken from his father and uncle on how to command a stage and work a crowd. But he’ll start with the MLB Players Trust gala on Tuesday.

This will be the biggest crowd that Berryhill has played his own songs for, he believes. And it will be the perfect one for him to debut the song about minor-league life that he started writing in that hotel room two years ago.