Jon Berti
"The man nobody drafted who spent six years in the minors and arrived in the big leagues with the ability to play almost anywhere"
Berti went undrafted out of Alma College — a Division III liberal arts school in central Michigan — and signed his first professional contract without a single team selecting him in the draft. He made his major league debut at 28, roughly six years after beginning his professional career at a level that most careers never leave.
As the Chicago Cubs build toward contention, Berti's ability to credibly play third base, second base, shortstop, and the outfield makes him the kind of roster piece that modern front offices covet: a player who creates flexibility rather than consuming a dedicated position slot. In a league increasingly built around matchup management, that is no longer a consolation role — it is a strategic one.
The utility player label tends to flatten what is actually a complicated story. Berti's career is not primarily about versatility as a natural gift — it is about perseverance through a professional pathway that, by any conventional metric, should not have led where it did. The undrafted-free-agent-to-sustained-MLB-career arc remains genuinely rare, and it tends to disappear behind the positional flexibility narrative.
Troy, Michigan, where Berti grew up, is a quiet Detroit suburb — a place defined by automotive industry workers, corporate office parks, and middle-class subdivisions. There is no famous baseball program there, no storied tradition producing professional players. He left for a small college that almost no scouts ever visit. For Japanese fans accustomed to players emerging through highly organized development pipelines — elite high school programs, powerhouse university teams, structured industrial leagues — Berti's trajectory would look almost invisible on paper, and yet it led to the major leagues.
When analysts call a player like Berti a 'Swiss Army knife,' the compliment has become reflex — and reflex obscures something worth noticing. To play shortstop credibly on Tuesday, third base on Thursday, and center field on Sunday requires not just athleticism but a specific psychological posture: the willingness to constantly be a beginner, to accept that on any given night you may be asked to perform a role you have not occupied in weeks, with no warm-up period and no margin for mechanical rust. Most professional players spend entire careers narrowing their focus to one position precisely because that is how defensive excellence is typically built. Berti has chosen, or been asked to choose, the opposite.
Jon Berti was born on January 22, 1990, in Troy, Michigan, and reached the major leagues by a route that most scouts would have considered impassable: undrafted out of a Division III college program, signed as a free agent, and seasoned through years of minor league work before debuting at age 28. Now a member of the Chicago Cubs, he represents a specific and increasingly valued archetype — the versatile, quick-footed utility player who gives a manager options rather than consuming a fixed roster slot.
| Year | Team | G | AVG | HR | RBI | SB | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | CHC | 53 | .210 | 0 | 2 | 11 | .492 |
| 2024 | NYY | 25 | .273 | 1 | 6 | 5 | .660 |
| 2023 | MIA | 133 | .294 | 7 | 33 | 16 | .749 |
| Career | — | 514 | .256 | 24 | 128 | 108 | .690 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
Troy, Michigan, and the Invisible Pipeline
Troy, Michigan, is one of those American cities that exist primarily as a backdrop — a ring of suburbs north of Detroit full of cul-de-sacs, chain restaurants, and the quiet industry of people who work in offices rather than on fields. It does not appear prominently in baseball's geography of origin stories. Jon Berti was born there on January 22, 1990, and grew up without the benefit of a famous high school program or a regional identity tied to producing professional athletes. He attended Alma College, a small liberal arts school in central Michigan that competes at the NCAA Division III level — the tier of college athletics that receives the least scout attention and generates the fewest draft picks. The MLB Draft is, among other things, a sorting mechanism: it signals organizational interest, allocates bonus money, and determines which players get the benefit of the doubt when they struggle early. Berti entered professional baseball without any of that signal. He signed as an undrafted free agent, which in practice means he began his career with the least leverage, the smallest investment, and the fewest internal advocates of any pathway into the game. He is listed at five feet ten inches and 190 pounds, bats right, throws right. Nothing about those dimensions, or about his entry point, suggested what would eventually follow.
Six Years Between Signing and Arriving
The minor leagues are, among other things, a prolonged test of attachment — a way of determining how much a player wants something when the evidence that he will get it is thin. Berti spent roughly six years working through professional baseball's lower levels before debuting in the major leagues on September 26, 2018, at age 28. That is late by the standards of the game, which tends to reward early arrivals and regard anyone still in the minors past 25 as a development story that hasn't resolved in the expected direction. What kept him viable in that system, through those years, was the combination of legitimate speed and positional adaptability. He could play multiple infield spots without embarrassing the team defensively, and he ran the bases with a precision and aggression that translated across levels. Speed ages differently than power; it is less dependent on peak physical development and more dependent on intelligence and timing. Berti's version of it was durable. His debut, when it finally came, was the kind of September call-up that organizations use to reward organizational longevity and let the parent club take a look. It did not announce itself with fanfare. But it was real, and it held.
American college baseball is organized into three NCAA divisions. Division I programs — think schools like LSU, Vanderbilt, or the University of Miami — receive the overwhelming majority of MLB scouting attention and produce the bulk of draft picks. Division III programs, like Alma College, typically do not have athletic scholarships and exist largely outside the professional pipeline. Players who attend them are, in practice, invisible to the draft process. Going undrafted is the expected outcome, not a disappointment.
The Utility Player as Modern Construction
Baseball has spent the last decade reconsidering what bench players are for. The old model valued specialists — a left-handed bat off the bench, a backup catcher, a late-inning defensive replacement at shortstop. The newer model, informed by analytics and roster optimization, increasingly values the player who can do several things adequately over the player who can do one thing exceptionally, because the former creates options and the latter consumes a slot. Berti arrived in the major leagues precisely as this revaluation was accelerating. His ability to move between third base, second base, shortstop, and the outfield — not as a novelty but as a genuine functional capability — made him the kind of piece that modern front offices build around rather than fill in. He has appeared with the Chicago Cubs wearing number 5, now 36 years old and deep into a career that the conventional logic of player development said should not have reached this point. What the box score records on any given evening is limited: a right-handed utility infielder from Troy, 5'10", wherever he happened to play that night. It does not record the years between signing and arriving, the accumulation of minor league bus rides and organizational priorities and the slow, patient work of becoming someone a major league club eventually cannot do without. The full picture lives somewhere else — in the long record of someone who made a career out of being useful, and who understood, perhaps earlier than most, that usefulness is its own form of skill.
When a player goes undrafted, he can still sign with a professional organization as a free agent — but the terms are considerably less favorable. Draft picks receive signing bonuses that reflect their organizational priority; undrafted free agents sign for minimal guaranteed money and enter systems without the developmental investment that selected players receive. They must outperform players the organization has chosen, with less margin for error and fewer people inside the front office arguing for their continued development. Building a sustained MLB career from that starting position is rare enough to constitute a genuine anomaly.
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Jon Berti gear at the official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.