The prodigious life of Sean Burroughs

The Little Leaguer we adopted in the 90s had several wins and losses before his shocking death on Thursday.

When Sean Burroughs was 12 years old, when he was hitting and pitching and grinning his way into America’s heart, he had his whole life ahead of him. Before Thursday afternoon, when his life officially ended at the age of 43, he still did.

This life would be the one rooted to the community and to his family. He had his EMT license. He was a security supervisor, but he had discussed becoming a firefighter. He would always be known in Long Beach, where he was the delighted face of the Little League team that won two World Series in Williamsport, but now his own bats and gloves were packed away, after he had fashioned a triumphant comeback. The first career was truncated, mostly by his own hand. 

He had Knox, a 6-year-old son, starting his own baseball journey, and he was the assistant coach on Knox’s team. Reportedly he was either on the bench or had just dropped off Knox at Stearns Champions Park when he suffered cardiac arrest.

It was brutal news for a city that has a little bit of everything and an awful lot of baseball.

Stearns Park is buzzing with kids and parents and coaches almost every week of the year. For many Long Beach kids it’s the first opportunity to be on a team with peers, to learn cooperation and unselfishness, and to hit baseballs thrown by coaches, machines and, ultimately, other kids. For quite a few of them it will be their final opportunity, but it won’t be forgotten, even if their only brush with the game is a season in T-ball, where the catcher puts on a mask, shin guards and a chest protector just like the guys on TV.

Grown-up relationships are also born at Stearns Park. Some die there, too, but the team moms and team dads often tighten their ties long after the juice boxes have been consumed, and the boys and girls quit playing, or play something else. For all of them, Sean Burroughs was a legendary figure, the Ohtani of Stearns Park. He was better than anybody could imagine being, and he had fun, too.

In 1992 Long Beach lost to The Phillippines in the championship game at Williamsport. But the Filipinos had a few players who were older than the rules allowed, and Long Beach won by default. Sean wound up on the David Letterman Show, where the host asked him if he’d suspected there was a scandal afoot. Sean said he did. “We saw them in the locker room shaving,” he said. He also told Letterman his goal was to become a gynecologist.

In 1993 Long Beach did it right, beating Panama in the final, and became the first American team to win two World Series consecutively. Sean told a TV reporter that he’d prepared by eating “three big bowls of cereal.” He was 5-foot-5 and weighed 170 but he also threw 75 mph fastballs. He had a Spanky McFarland quality that probably made a lot of fat-shamed kids walk a little taller, and he hit 17 home runs and threw three consecutive no-hitters in his playoff days. One of those no-hitters and two of those home runs came against Bedford, N.H. in the U.S. championship game in ‘92.

Sean’s dad Jeff was the American League Most Valuable Player with Texas in 1974, but there was no big-league pressure. Let it all hang out, Jeff said, and they all did, right up to the point where Jeremy Hess drove in the winning run in the final inning. Sean’s mother Debbie was there for every pitch, too, holding her collection of troll dolls that became the team’s accessory.

Little League heroes come and go, but Burroughs had a longer fame slot than most. He was almost as devastating at Wilson High, where Jeff had attended, and was a first-round pick of the Padres. In 2000 he was the third baseman on Tom Lasorda’s U.S. Olympic team that won the gold medal in Sydney, and he hit .375. When he made the majors at 21, he captured third base and moved Phil Nevin to first, which irked Nevin until he saw Sean arriving early to catch grounders and whistling while he worked.

Burroughs drove in 58 runs and hit .286 with a .755  OPS in 2002, and he hit .295 the next year. But he wasn’t a power hitter and he was playing a power position, and he was also playing in an era of better slugging through chemistry. The majors had little room for singles-hitting third basemen. The Padres dealt him to Tampa Bay for pitcher Dewon Brazelton after the 2005 season. Burroughs was out of baseball a year later and would not return for five years.

The parades and the autographs were over. Burroughs lived mostly in Las Vegas, although none of his addresses were permanent. He later told reporters he was living in cheap, unsanitary motels, literally eating out of garbage cans, and taking every controlled substance he could find, in uncontrolled fashion. He lost touch with his family. At one point he’d ballooned to 260 pounds.

But he worked his way back to Long Beach and moved back in with his family, and in 2010 he began telling people he would play baseball again. Few would listen, but Kevin Towers did. Towers had been San Diego’s general manager, had supervised the drafting of Burroughs, had even thought he’d seen a little Tony Gwynn in him, speaking of Long Beach dignitaries. Now Towers was running the Diamondbacks and invited Burroughs back into the game. A cruel footnote: Towers, who died of cancer in 2018, was best friends with agent Barry Axelrod, who also died Thursday.

Burroughs hit .412 at Triple-A Reno and joined the “big club,” and he stuck around to help the Diamondbacks win a playoff spot. In the final game of their 5-game series with Milwaukee, Burroughs had a ninth-inning single that moved Gerardo Parra into position to score the tying run on Willie Bloomquist’s base hit. Milwaukee won in the 10th, and Burroughs moved on to the Twins in 2012, where he lasted 10 games. The baseball ended there, but it was finished business. Burroughs would carry the memory of the night the Diamondbacks clinched that playoff spot, when he stood on the dugout railing and cried.

How much did Sean’s childhood fame have to do with his crash? Impossible to know, really, In retrospect he said the “expectations” had become uncomfortable, but Sean had raised that bar himself. When a nation adopts you, it holds on tight. Burroughs would not be allowed to fail silently. Instead, he disappeared.

The kid with the joyful face still lives, in black-and-white photos from old newspapers.  Burroughs had said he wanted his life “to be an adventure.” He lived a bunch of them, and survived them, and was poised to follow the very best one, until Thursday.

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