Sean Burroughs was the most remarkable kid ballplayer I ever saw. When he was 12 years old he had about a 50-50 chance of hitting a home run every time he came to bat, and this was against the best kiddie competition around. He also was a very, very good pitcher. He was the main reason why Long Beach Little League won two Little League World Series, 1992-93.

He had a nice prep career at Long Beach Wilson, was a first-round draft choice when he was 17 and made his debut with the San Diego Padres at age 21.

It seemed as if he had perhaps avoided that “child prodigy, troubled adult” meme … but he hadn’t. By 2007, he was out of baseball. He wound up in Las Vegas, doing drugs and drinking heavily, eating food out of Dumpsters … and he went completely off the grid.

However, Burroughs cleaned up, returned to baseball and has returned to the major leagues with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

It’s a fascinating story.

The very well-done feature/profile by Jim Caple of espn.com can be seen here.

I watched Burroughs when he was a pudgy 11-12-year-old, playing in the Little League Western Regionals in San Bernardino, California. This would have been 1992 and 1993.

He wasn’t the biggest kid, but he seemed to be the strongest, at that point in time. He clearly had received a lot of coaching, some of it from his father, the 1974 American League MVP Jeff Burroughs.

Sean the Kid just killed the ball. Long Beach LL led him off to maximize his at-bats in six-inning games, and other teams tried to pitch around him. If you threw him a strike, it was going over that Little League fence, only 200 feet distant. You could count on it.

He attracted fans, thousands of them, who came to see him play. Long Beach drew crowds of 8,000, 9,000 at Western Regional HQ in San Bernardino. They came from all over Southern California just to see Sean Burroughs hit.

For his age, he was a smooth operator. Gave interviews. Said cliche things, but what do you expect from a kid in sixth or seventh grade? He clearly knew his business. He was cocky on the field, and why wouldn’t he be?

He made a huge impression on anyone who saw him play, at that age. Most of the superstars in the Little League world are the guys who turn 13 one day ahead of the age deadline or the ones who hit their growth spurts early. The guys who are 5-foot-9 in a team of 5-foot-nothing kids. Burroughs wasn’t tiny, but he wasn’t that 5-foot-9 kid, either. He was maybe 5-5 and stocky. He just had significant gifts. He threw right but hit left, and his power from the left side and round body gave him a sort of Kiddie Babe Ruth feel.

We kept an eye on him, after that, and when he joined the Padres in 2002, I drove down to San Diego to interview him. He was still a bad interview, but he was pleasant enough, and he was being given the third-base job. Looked like he would be around for a while.

Most of us know that the kids who are too good too young — in anything — rarely turn out well. Their lives get skewed and weird from the early attention, and they seem to be forced (or expected) to mature socially at an age way too young. With all the media around the past 10 years, it seems worse than ever to be a gifted child.

That may have been involved when Burroughs skidded off the tracks.

Things began to go badly when the kid slugger turned into the adult singles hitter. He had no power. It seemed some sort of cruel galactic joke. The 12-year-old who went deep at least once a game has 11 home runs in 1,723 plate appearances.

It seemed as if he might be able to patch together a career as a singles hitter with a bit of gap power and a decent on-base percentage, but after his first two full seasons the doubles disappeared and his average sank, and he was a bust.

I saw his name in a box score the other night, marveled that he was back in the bigs after his long disappearance … and I went on a google search and found the Caple story.

If you read the story you see that Burroughs just stopped caring about baseball, which was all he had ever known, and crashed out in Las Vegas. He didn’t turn things around until he moved home to Long Beach, California, and moved back into the room he occupied when he was a child prodigy.

The Arizona Diamondbacks signed him before the season, and he had a great spring and was hitting the ball well in Triple-A, and that has earned him two calls up to the bigs, and in the past few days he even has driven in a couple of runs for the Diamondbacks.

I hope Sean Burroughs holds it together. This may seem weird, but I feared for him, back when he was 12. It seemed like too much too soon … and I had seen how that story usually ends.

Maybe his recovery from the dark days will be the turning point in his life. I hope so, whether or not that involves playing in the bigs.