Mike Gutierrez is average height and he doesn't throw particularly hard. The 6-feet-2 inch left handed pitcher out of UC Santa Barbara relies on control and his lively changeup to keep hitters off balance.

Professional baseball has a system that spans multiple teams and leagues within a single organization.

The professional system has changed over the years with more analytics being used to evaluate players in the draft. In addition there is more competition from countries abroad like Japan and the Dominican Republic.

Will Bermudez baseball card.

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For players that aren’t as tall in stature or do not throw as hard as the scouts are looking for, they must carve their own niche into the game with the game rapidly changing.

Will Bermudez is not a perfect prospect. But the second baseman at UC Irvine plays silky smooth defense and his switch-hitting ability has come in handy to his Division I team, UC Irvine.

In Bermudez and Gutierrez’s scenarios they will have to work that much harder to improve— and prove — themselves than players in the bigger conferences like the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Their path to the pros, while not impossible, is highly unlikely. They are in the Big West conference, not the more prestigious Atlantic Coast conference, and few players make it out of the Big West into the big leagues.

“I think what you can control is just being a good teammate, going out there controlling on a day to day basis and just seeing if you're lucky enough to get drafted,” said Gutierrez.

By the Numbers

The odds of any boy growing up to become a professional baseball player are incredibly low.

While NCAA athletes like Gutierrez and Bermudez have made it through several levels, the odds of going pro have recently gotten worse; the 2023 draft will for the first time have 20 rounds instead of the traditional 40, to cut the costs for MLB teams signing players out of the draft.

Mike Guterriez baseball card.

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Once drafted into the major league baseball system, rookies are usually placed into Low A, which is the lowest level of professional baseball affiliated with the MLB. From there players try to work their way up through Single A, Double A, Triple A leagues, and then eventually to the MLB.

Different players follow different paths and no league is mandatory en route to the highest level of baseball, but almost every current MLB, besides a few international players, has spent at least some time in the minor league system.

Bermudez is in his senior season at UC Irvine and will be looking to capitalize on his second season in the blue and yellow.

“I only have a certain amount of time to play baseball and I want to take it as long as I can go and then we'll go from there,” said Bermudez about the difficult path to the MLB.

With many players earning on average 10,000 to 15,000 dollars for playing in the minor leagues, it becomes more than the money for a majority of the baseball players.

Playing from the young ages of 5-6 years old, Bermudez and Gutierrez are willing to grind the low paying minor league baseball salaries if it means living out their childhood dreams.

There are 2 million kids that play baseball across 80 countries and 50 states, according to the global Little League Organization.

They made it to their high school teams, which put them among the 500,000 players at that level. Of them, fewer than 3% make it to Division 1 university level baseball. Of that greatly reduced number, less than 10% ever play paid professional baseball at any level in the U.S. or the World.

Of the 8,000 or so minor league baseball players, just one in 10 end up playing at 10 end up playing at least one game of the 30 teams that make up major league baseball.

Humble Beginnings

Most Division 1 baseball players are recruited straight out of high school, but a select few are not.

Gutierrez took the unconventional route to Division 1 baseball going to community college at Mt. San Antonio College in California before committing to UC Santa Barbara due to their coaching reputation. UCSB in recent seasons has dominated the Big West making the college World Series under current coach Andrew Checketts.

“Talking to the coaches, seeing their philosophy and kind of just knowing that the guys went on to the big leagues I saw their development program was pretty good.”

After gradually earning a slot in the starting rotation during his first season at UCSB, Gutierrez posted an era of 2.54 in 2023, scoring a spot on the Golden Spikes Award Watch List of top players in all of college baseball. The list is voted on by a selection committee of previous winners and team USA personnel.

He credits his teammates and coaches for pushing him with the use of state of the art analytics to monitor his pitches.

“Once I started throwing bullpens at UCSB there was a camera there showing the horizontal break, the spin rate and pretty much the coaches are trying to make a good pitcher into a great pitcher.”

Gutierrez, who will be 23 years old next season, will continue his pursuit of professional baseball, but will be returning to UCSB for one more season where he will hope to improve his draft stock and win the collegiate championship.

“I think the number one goal is to be healthy and be the best teammate I can. Throw a little bit harder, be a little bit more athletic and continue to be more conditioned,” said Gutierrez.

Overcoming Adversity

Bermudez agreed to play for the University of Air Force out of St. Paul high school. Then life took an unexpected turn during his senior year.

He developed epilepsy, which automatically excludes people from serving in the U.S. military. “I couldn’t be in military school with epilepsy, so I decided to go to UC Davis for my freshman year,” said Bermudez.

Despite those challenges, his love of baseball remained.

After baseball resumed following the Covid-19 epidemic, Bermudez decided to move closer to home, and enrolled in junior college to pursue baseball.

From there, he earned an offer to play baseball from UC Irvine, Bermudez decided to pursue baseball while pursuing an undergraduate degree in Sports Psychology. Due to his diagnosis with epilepsy, he would like to learn and help others that have gone through the same experiences as himself.

“I wasn’t able to play for like six months and my memory still to this day is kind of bad. But it was a lot of mental physical therapy kind of side thing. Like focusing on my memory and how to put things together.”

Putting his life back together became his first priority, and once he mastered his mental side, Bermudez picked up baseball again.

“So that's what kind of put me into the sports psychology realm.”

At UC Irvine, he has excelled on the field, being one of the top infielders at second base in the Big West conference.

In the bigger picture, Bermudez is trying to figure out how to stand out to coaches and scouts to make it to the minor leagues. One way is to cut down the 50 times he struck out in the 2022-23 baseball season at UCI.

“I didn't hit 15 ‘bombs’. I don't have that leeway. … if you hit 15 homers you're good.”

Bermudez talking about the rising equality to be drafted from the West Coast NCAA schools.
Photo courtesy of Will Bermudez

Still, he has reasons for hope, “I got hit by 23 pitches so my on-base percentage was high.” But, he notes, “I didn't put the ball in play 50 times. So if I can minimize [the strikeouts], that gives me more opportunity to get on base.”

Like Guterriez, Bermudez has no endpoint in sight for his college baseball career despite the low likelihood of making the MLB.

“I've gotten a couple of teams to talk to just after games and stuff like that. God willing after the season, if I have a good season, we'll see what happens.”

The Short Reality

There is a future once players' careers come to a close.

Current Los Angeles Dodgers pitching coach, Mark Prior, had a short-lived pro career from 2002-06 playing for the Chicago Cubs. He says that his time under coach Mike Gillespe at USC inspired him to become a coach.

He coaches now in hopes he “can impact other players' lives” like Gillespe was able to impact him.

Prior explained that he wouldn’t be the person he is today without the game and his involvement early in baseball.

“Playing baseball can provide a lot of opportunities and open a lot of different doors and you get a chance to meet and develop friendships with a lot of people,” said Prior.

Although Prior has a job in baseball as a pro coach for the Dodgers, not many are able to say they continued to stay around the pro realm.

Other former pros like pitcher Nigel Nootbaar who played in the minors from 2014-15 have fashioned their post-player lives. He is now working as a commercial insurance agent in the same city he grew up going to USC baseball games as a kid, right in Los Angeles.

Nootbaar, who grew up with baseball, still has a brother representing the family, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Money or Magic

With teams and leagues across the worldincreasing profits year by year, leagues are popping up in countries — like the United Arab Emirates and India — where baseball was once an afterthought.

Pitcher Ryan Evans, signed a professional contract with the Lancaster Barnstormers in the Atlantic League but was released shortly after his first season due to COVID-19 putting teams in a tight spot for money, bringing no fans to their ballparks.

With a contract offered to Evans in Australia, he chose to stay put in the United States and test the waters of independent baseball leagues within the U.S.

Australia isn’t the only country adding a baseball league, as the Baseball United League has added a league in 2023 promoting baseball in the Middle East and South Asia.

The United Baseball league has added former MLB veteran players like Bartolo Colon, Didi Gregorious and Andrelton Simmons, trying to spur more minor league players to join the league. All these players come from other countries like the Dominican Republic and Curacao.

With the Atlantic League and Frontier League both in the United States, Evans was based away from his hometown New Jersey, in Pennsylvania and New York.

“I was nervous to go overseas alone without anyone I knew," he explains.

But Evans said he wouldn’t trade the pay abroad for the experience of minor league baseball in the U.S.

“The minor leagues are worth it because of all of the different types of people you meet over the years, all players of different countries. Definitely was my dream to play in the MLB as a kid, still is my dream 20 years later,” said Evans.