How hard work and odd jobs helped Steward Berroa achieve MLB dream with Blue Jays

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Standing shirtless at his locker early one morning this spring, Steward Berroa scrolled through the old photos and videos on his phone.

Unloading renovation materials from the back of a trailer. Leaning on the doorframe of an old home in a white t-shirt and overalls, paint splotches dotted all over. Dancing and laughing in the front seat of his unamused uncle’s truck, Dominican music blaring, as they rolled down the highway to the next job site.

This is what Berroa’s off-seasons used to look like. Young, broke and trying to claw his way up the Toronto Blue Jays organizational ladder, the outfielder annually worked odd jobs following minor-league campaigns in the U.S., banking money he’d take home to the Dominican Republic to get him through the rest of the winter.

That uncle, Ali, was a contractor who renovated houses in Massachusetts and was a dependable source of work most years. Berroa would paint, install drywall, do a little bit of everything in between. How was the pay?

“Not good, honestly. But it was something,” he says. “It was something to get by.”

One year, Berroa went to a New Hampshire job fair and got a gig at a factory hauling around skids of puzzle pieces. He was so diligent and reliable that he was quickly promoted to an assembly position, and elevated again to quality control, ensuring each individual puzzle box contained all its components. By the holiday season, he was working a desk job coordinating deliveries.

Living with his mom, Lissette, who moved to Lawrence, Mass. when she was married in 2017, and his sister, Lisbeth, who works in a shoe factory, Berroa would save every dollar he could to afford food and coaching when he eventually returned to the Dominican. He knew some guys from his El Niche Academy days who he’d pay to pitch to him, hit him flyballs, and put him through workouts in the gym.

“At that point, in the minor leagues, we weren’t well paid. So, every dollar counts,” says Berroa, who signed with the Blue Jays for $10,000 in 2016. “The good thing about the DR is you’ve got a lot of people that really like to help. It doesn’t always work like that, right? But you still have to handle business. You have to have money to survive.”

Learn a bit about his backstory and it starts to make sense why Berroa is the way he is. Energetic, gregarious, relentlessly positive. Upon earning his first major-league call-up midway through 2024, the 25-year-old hit a wearied, eight-games-below-.500 Blue Jays clubhouse like espresso.

A prototypical 26th man on the roster if there ever was one, Berroa didn’t get a plate appearance during his first big-league stint and had to wait two weeks to get one in his second. He spent over two months on the active roster yet rarely set foot in the batter’s box, finishing the season with 45 trips to the plate.

But his purely vibes-based impact around the Blue Jays clubhouse was indisputable. Every day in the big leagues was the best day of his life. Blue Jays manager John Schneider often joked about wanting to keep Berroa close by in the dugout in hopes of absorbing some energy by osmosis.

It’s not like Berroa can’t play. He hit .281/.371/.454 with 10 homers and a 117 wRC+ in 300 triple-A plate appearances last season. He flashes sneaky pop for his size — Berroa’s listed at five-foot-nine, 178 pounds — with a max exit velocity over 108 m.p.h., and has progressively cut his groundball rate as he’s advanced levels. The switch-hitter spent nearly half of 2024 in the majors yet still finished sixth in the International League with 34 stolen bases.

It’s that guys like him — undersized, lacking an elite tool, greater whole than the sum of their parts — typically don’t get the opportunity to play at the highest level. They settle in as organizational players, or bounce between benches via waivers for a few years, maybe chase cheques overseas. And that’s not lost on Berroa.

“I’ve never had a lot of expectations. And there’s a lot more players than just me that don't have those big expectations,” he says. “But there’s a lot of guys, too, that have changed their lives through baseball.”

All he’s ever needed is a chance. Berroa’s been promoted to, and demoted from, every affiliate in the organization over his decade with the Blue Jays. Yet every time he’s struggled at a new level, he’s come back the next season and looked like a different guy. A 45 wRC+ in his first taste of double-A became a 123 wRC+ when he returned a year later. A .505 OPS in his first triple-A stint at the end of 2023 led to an .831 OPS at the level over the first three months of 2024.

Still, when Berroa was pulled from a Buffalo Bisons game last June while standing on second base after his third hit of the night, he never thought it was because he was going to the majors. And he really didn’t think it after his manager, Casey Candaele, told him he was being benched for not running hard upon returning to the dugout.

“I was like, ‘What do you mean? I always run hard,’” Berroa says. “And then he told me to go work on it in Toronto.”

Berroa will cut you straight — he doubted the day would come. Often. When he was sidelined by multiple injuries while struggling with culture shock during his first North American season in 2018. When he was a .236 rookie ball hitter a year later. When he was working out alone in the Dominican during the 2020 pandemic, knowing organizations across MLB were culling their systems of lower-priority prospects like him. When he began 2022 in double-A, fell into a deep funk, and was sent down to high-A for the rest of the season.

He still didn’t believe it when he was wearing a Blue Jays uniform in Cleveland late last June, pacing up and down the dugout as Alejandro Kirk pinch-hit for Kevin Kiermaier, having just been told he was about to enter the game as either a pinch-runner or defensive replacement.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I'm really about to go in. This is really happening.’ That shocked me a little bit,” he says. “I went out for defence and it was the first time ever that I saw home plate so far away. Everything zoomed out for me. I started looking around at all the stuff — the fans, the stadium. I couldn't believe that was me standing there. That was one of the craziest moments of my life.”

Three weeks later, he got his first major-league start in Arizona and made a pair of game-saving catches in right field:

Two weeks after that, he got his second start and his first big-league hit:

The next day, Berroa got to the Blue Jays clubhouse early and put the lineup card from the prior night’s game out on a table with a sharpie for all his teammates and coaches to sign. He’d been to the plate only nine times in the five weeks since his call-up. He wasn’t sure how many more chances he’d get to have moments like those.

“Every time I get to go out there (on a major-league field,) it's like the dream that you always dreamed of as a kid,” he says. “You're living your dream, you know? You’re around all these really good guys. Guys that you used to watch on TV. Now you're playing with them. You're teammates with them. That's amazing. That’s something that you can't call a job. I worked hard for it, I got it, and I enjoy every moment.”

Players in his circumstances must seize every moment, too, and Berroa’s done his best this spring. He’s 10-for-30 with three stolen bases and the third-longest home run any Blue Jay has hit in a pitch-tracked game so far:

Wind schmind. That’s still a barrel off an Orion Kerkering slider — the Phillies leverage reliever has allowed only one homer off that pitch in his big-league career — at the bottom of the zone.

“Yeah, he showed he could do that at triple-A last year,” says Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “He's having a quietly good camp. Beating out infield singles, going dead centre. He understands that he can play in the major leagues now. And he's a completely different guy than he was this time last year.”

It’s what he does. What he must do. Berroa is aware players like him can’t afford to plateau. The high-priority, multimillion-dollar bonus kids get the patience and grace to work through prolonged growing pains at the highest levels. For the $10,000 organizational guys like him who weren’t supposed to make it to the majors in the first place, a slump can get you written off.

It's why he’s continually found ways to improve and shed weaknesses whenever the game’s exposed his flaws. He’s drilled his way to better reads and routes in the outfield; he’s packed on as much muscle as his slight frame will allow and increased his exit velocities; he’s improved his bat path to keep balls off the ground; he’s gained fluency in a new language and brought energy to every dugout he’s entered, whether his name’s in the lineup or not.

Every time he’s gotten his ass kicked at a new level, Berroa’s gone away and come back better prepared for whenever he was given another shot. It’s why he spent off-seasons painting houses and labouring in factories during his early-20’s to afford extra coaching. Why he plays winter ball whenever he’s home. Players like him can’t count on continued opportunities. They have to force it themselves.

Berroa doesn’t have to go to quite the same lengths to make ends meet during off-seasons anymore. But he hasn’t forgotten what it was like.

“Maybe it's because of working all those regular jobs — every day, having my 15-minute break, my 30-minute lunch, then back to work — that gave me a little extra when I came here,” Berroa says. “Like, do I really want that? Do I want to go back to a regular job? Or do I want to keep playing baseball and live my dream? That gives me some extra energy — the stuff that you guys see. I try to want this a little bit more than some other guys. And I feel like that's what keeps me here.”