“Music was always my first love…Baseball came later.”

People who know me for my baseball career might say I am an athlete turned musician, but it is actually quite the opposite. Music was always my first love. Baseball came later.

Growing up in a show-business family, we were always listening to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Earth Wind and Fire through my Dad’s professional monitors in our living room. My father was an accomplished musician who arranged and conducted for the great Nat King Cole in the 1960s. My mother dropped out of UCLA to sing on Nat’s tour around that same time, which is how Mom and Dad eventually met and fell in love.

Ever since my late 20s, the dream was to write and produce Pop music in Los Angeles after retiring from sports. But life took me to Nashville for my final year in baseball, and I eventually decided to settle there and began my journey as a professional songwriter. Writing songs on Music Row for almost three years was just the beginning. After taking some time away to pen my book, Curveball , I came back to music the way I had always dreamed – as a writer and producer, and hungrier than ever. I kept my head in the sand for a couple years and learned enough about production and engineering to begin pairing those skills with my songwriting in efforts to bring more life to the songs. It was at that time that I found myself writing in the genres I adored as a child: Funk, R&B and Pop.

Experiencing God through chords, melodies and words is ultimately the thing that I desire each day, and it is my mission to apply the hard-earned lessons of relentless perseverance I learned in baseball to the always-challenging yet invigorating endeavor of putting words and melodies to music. 

As for baseball, it is now a distant, almost surreal memory. It’s just something I did. Something cool, for sure, but music isn’t just something I do.

Music is who I am.