All of it started because of an ugly painting. Blake McFarland was going to junior college, living at his parents’ house in San Jose, and every day he walked by the rendering of a koi fish he thought particularly awful. McFarland told his mom, Terryl, he could do better, even though he never had painted.

“I kind of just wanted to see what it was like,” McFarland said, and that inherent blend of curiosity and competition happens to have served him well beyond the acrylic-on-canvas ocean scene he created and sold to one of Terryl’s friends for $50. It guided McFarland from football to baseball, from painting to prize-winning art made of recycled tires and, he hopes, from the depths of the minor leagues to Toronto, where he could find himself this season after one of the unlikeliest ascents in recent years.

These days, McFarland whiles away his charmed life on St. Maarten, where he swims in the Atlantic Ocean and catches fish with a spear gun and counts down the days until Feb. 21, when pitchers and catchers are due to report to Toronto Blue Jays spring training in Dunedin, Fla. After five years in the organization, the Blue Jays placed the 27-year-old McFarland on their 40-man roster in November, gilding his path to the major leagues where as a rookie he almost assuredly would capture the title of baseball’s truest Renaissance Man.

While plenty of ballplayers fish and enough surf, none understands the vagaries of procuring tires or wine-bottle corks by the hundred or used surfboards to re-appropriate. This has been McFarland’s life in the offseason, a duality he balanced until his wife, Jessica, enrolled in the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine this winter and gave him a good reason to spend it in St. Maarten, where the school is located. Without his artwork, McFarland finds it easier to focus on baseball, which is perhaps the right maneuver with the major leagues so close.

Three years ago, McFarland figured the possibility of making it was nil. He was the perpetual underdog. Jim Harbaugh recruited McFarland, a 6-foot-5 tight end, to play at the University of San Diego like his brother, Jason. McFarland preferred baseball but didn’t throw hard enough to warrant interest from Division I college baseball teams, so he spent his freshman year playing football at a junior college. He transferred to a juco in Santa Barbara, switched back to baseball and wound up at San Jose State for his final two years of college.

In the 2011 draft following McFarland’s senior season, teams selected 1,530 players. He was not one of them. A scout named Randy Kramer called McFarland after the draft ended and said the Blue Jays wanted to sign him. He didn’t get a penny for the privilege. “Zero. Nothing,” McFarland said. “There’s guys in the locker room next to me with all these bonuses. Here I am, sitting with a plane ticket.”

It was an opportunity, and that’s all McFarland ever needed. In the offseason after the 2011 and ’12 seasons, his interest in art grew enough that he would buy old surfboards, refinish them, paint ocean scenes on them and sell them. McFarland liked working with recycled materials because making something out of nothing spoke to him.

View photos McFarland is on the Jays' 40-man roster. (Courtesy of Blake McFarland) More

While McFarland’s fastball had ticked up into the low 90s, it was no great shakes for a right-hander, and his lack of a second pitch seemed destined to torpedo his career. In spring 2013, Rick Langford, the Blue Jays’ pitcher whisperer, saw McFarland’s over-the-top delivery – think Josh Collmenter, hammer-throwing type – and his giant hands and wondered if he’d ever tried throwing a split-finger fastball.

Story continues