Barry Zito

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.
Ever since my late 20s, the dream was to write and produce Pop music in Los Angeles after retiring from sports. But after baseball, life took me to Nashville where I began my journey as a songwriter.
Writing songs on Music Row for almost three years was just the beginning. After taking some time away to pen my book, I came back to music the way I had always dreamed – as a writer and producer. I immersed myself into the technology of learning music production and engineering in efforts to bring more life to my 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 the creation of chords, melodies and words is ultimately the thing that most excites me. On this journey of music I feel grateful for the hard-earned lessons of relentless perseverance I learned in baseball, and apply them daily while in my creative process of putting music to words.


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.