When a dream dies

 We called Sean Burroughs The $2-Million Man, back in those innocent days.

It was the spring of  '99 and Burroughs was not yet 19 years old, but we all knew who he was. He was the son of former major leaguer Jeff Burroughs. He had been, seven years before, the hero of back-to-back Little World Series champions, a fearsome pitcher from Long Beach, Calif., who sawed off the bats of sawed-off Little Leaguers. And now?

Now he was the San Diego Padres' Next Big Thing, their bonus baby. A $2-million bonus, to be exact, which is why we called him the $2-Million Man.

The Padres had just become the parent club of our Class A Fort Wayne Wizards, see, and in the spring of '99 (back when mid-market newspapers were still flush and still had travel budgets) the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette sent three of us to Arizona to check out what sort of team we'd have in the Fort that year. Burroughs, of course, was the primary focus of that checking out.

What I remember about him was he was a quiet kid with obvious skills and what seemed at the time a limitless future.

And then two months ago, I opened a news site and saw that Sean Burroughs had died.

And this morning I opened another news site, and saw the cause of death was fetanyl intoxication.

He died of cardiac arrest in the parking lot of a Long Beach park, police determined. Passed from this world to the next lying on the ground beside his car, as EMTs vainly worked to get his heart beating again.

Sean Burroughs was just 43 years old.

And now I'm thinking back to that spring a quarter century ago, and I'm wondering what the hell happened. I'm wondering how and when Burroughs' reported struggles with substance abuse began, and if his bonus-baby dream died suddenly or just gradually, one fruitless swing of the bat at a time.

I'm guessing it was probably the latter, and I'm guessing it was a hard death. You come up knowing nothing but ceaseless triumph -- come up with the game as natural to you as breathing -- what happens when the triumph stops being ceaseless? Or when the game stops being like breathing?

The answers are as speculative as they seem obvious, and therefore likely unfair to Sean Burroughs. Life is not a movie script, and its narratives rarely march neatly from one act to the next. There are detours and tangents and meandering dead ends that follow no logic but their own, and moments of clarity even in the messiest of times.

All we know is in the spring of '99, Sean Burroughs came north with the Wizards, and that summer he batted .359 with an on-base percentage (OBP) of .464, and he reached base in 56 straight games. All of those remain club records.

After that?

After that, not a lot. Burroughs went on to play seven major-league seasons with four teams -- the Padres, Tampa Bay, Arizona and Minnesota -- and batted .278 with 12 homers and 143 RBI in 528 career games. He was out of the game entirely by the time he was 25, then made a brief comeback at 30, playing 78 games with the Diamondbacks in 2011 and 10 games with the Twins in 2012.

Twelve years later he is gone, dying on a May afternoon at the Long Beach park where he coached Little Leaguers 30 years after the height of his glory.

If only time could have stopped then, for Sean Burroughs. If only it could have stopped in the spring of '99, when he was the $2-Million Man and headed for a summer to remember in a mid-sized city in Indiana, and his future stretched bright and unfettered before him.