PHILADELPHIA — The best story of Phillies spring training almost never began.

Three years before Otto Kemp crossed home plate on a Bryce Harper base hit on Sunday afternoon, the 25-year-old utility man sat in a living room in San Clemente, Calif., and watched his career flash before his eyes.

There were multiple flashes, really. Six-hundred-sixteen of them, at one-minute intervals. Name after name, none of them his. Nine hours. Three days. Twenty rounds.

Kemp watched them all.

“That’s what drives you, remembering what that weekend felt like,” Kemp said, “because those were a miserable few days.”

Well, misery can be an end or it can be an origin story. In Kemp’s case, it has propelled him from an undrafted nobody through four levels of minor league ball to a dynamite Arizona Fall League performance that he had to cut short in order to attend his own wedding but that nevertheless earned him an invitation to big league spring training, where he is currently raking like a man who knows where he belongs.

And that’s just the last 11 months.

“I’m trying to enjoy every bit of it,” said Kemp, who started at third base for the Phillies in Sunday’s 12-2 win over the Orioles and now ranks among the team’s Grapefruit League leaders in a slew of offensive categories.

After going undrafted out of Division II powerhouse Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and signing with the Phillies as a free agent, Kemp has wielded his bat and his will to render himself impossible to ignore. It made him an intriguing prospect to watch at the start of the spring. The intrigue has only grown. He has reached base 12 times in 11 Grapefruit League games, more than anybody on the team. He did so twice in Sunday’s 12-2 win, while starting at third base. His three doubles are tied for second on the team, behind only Alec Bohm. His four runs scored are tied for third.

Kemp is not a blue-chip prospect. He shares a wall with a couple of them in the Phillies’ clubhouse at BayCare Ballpark. Aidan Miller and Justin Crawford occupy lockers on one side of a free-standing modular setup in the midst of the big-name veterans that ring the perimeter. If this were a South Philly row home, he could knock on the brick and tell the kids to keep it down. It shouldn’t surprise anybody if he is in the big leagues before them.

What Kemp lacks in draft pedigree he makes up for in results. Some scouts call him a hitter without a position. Others say he’s a guy who might force you to figure it out.

“He has the hit tool,” said Justin James, who coached him at Point Loma Nazarene. “I think he can be a super utility guy. Move him around. Kind of like a Kiké Hernández.”

Like Kemp, James followed that 2022 draft living and dying with every pick, with every text he received from scouts. He’d signed Kemp out of high school and knew he was lucky to have done so. Kemp had missed his senior year of high school after reinjuring a knee that had cost him a chunk of the previous season. A Division I recruit as a junior, he graduated with no offers.

Point Loma Nazarene turned out to be a blessing in disguise, with an idyllic campus and a home stadium overlooking the Pacific. The disguise took a while to wear off: a blood clot in his shoulder during his freshman season left him on the sidelines and on blood thinners.

By the end of his college career, Kemp had undergone five surgeries, including one to repair a fractured hamate (thumb/wrist) that he injured his senior season. Kemp thinks those medicals played a role in him going undrafted. To his coach, they have shaped his belief in what still lies in store.

The fractured hamate occurred in practice late in Kemp’s senior season. It is an injury common in hitters as a result of the force imparted on the bottom of the left hand during a swing. It is incredibly painful, the telltale sign a wince and a shake of the hand after following through. James saw it. He also saw Kemp lead the Sea Lions to the Division II World Series with the fractured hand.

Two memories:

“I knew he couldn’t squeeze his glove,” James said. “But he squeezed it.”

The draft came. The draft went. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. He’d spent each of the nine-plus hours of the television broadcasts surrounded by his family. Now he needed a moment alone.

“I lost it after that,” Kemp said. “I was pretty beat.”

But then the phone rang. Phillies scout Zach Friedman had watched Kemp since high school. They’d kept in touch throughout the process.

“We have a little something for you,” Friedman said.

Kemp didn’t know what that meant, but he signed the contract and flew east to Clearwater, Fla., and checked into the La Quinta hotel around the corner from the ballpark. The next three months revealed what he’d always believed. He belonged. He would belong. It was only a matter of time.

After spending the offseason at home, he returned to Clearwater in the spring of 2023. He finished it at Jersey Shore. By the end of 2024, he was at Lehigh Valley, en route to the Arizona Fall League. Next came the Arizona Fall League, where he posted a 1.194 OPS. Except, he had to leave early, because he was getting married.

“I’m big on goals,” Kemp said with a laugh. “So when we were looking at a wedding date I looked at the Arizona Fall League schedule and figured Nov. 10 would be safe. Of course, they started a week late that year.”

After playing a doubleheader on Nov. 6, he drove five hours back home and arrived at 2 a.m. When he awoke, the wedding weekend festivities began.

He’d shown more than enough. With a right-handed swing and a compact Chuck Knoblauch frame, Kemp has forced his way onto the Phillies’ radar. There are questions about his position, but fewer questions about his bat.

As of Sunday, he remains in big league camp. And he is still very much hitting.

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