If their opinion wasn't already evident by him being named the White Sox's Opening Day starter, pitching coach Ethan Katz called Sean Burke "one of the best arms in the organization" in late spring. And since the best Sox pitching prospects are largely in Double-A Birmingham, I asked him recently to unpack what prompted him to say this.
"He didn't show it in his last game, but his command of his secondary stuff, his command of it is really good," Katz said, already hinting at the trend this article is about. "He gets it to good locations, gets it to putaway locations when he needs to, for strikes when he needs to, and they're very good quality pitches. So being able to do that and also run the fastball up to the mid-to-upper 90s, when you have those options, you can do a lot of special things."
I dredge this quote up not to skewer my longtime counterpart, but to demonstrate that the manner in which Burke is currently struggling is antithetical to how he is supposed to thrive. He hasn't been striking people out (10 in 16⅔ IP), but the five home runs in that span are a much more acute factor in the 7.56 ERA through four starts, and there's a through line with that issue.
These are all breaking ball locations that wound up in the seats.
Don't throw your breaking balls in hittable locations is decent advice, but more the type you get from the bleachers than your pitching coach. After looking through the biomechanics of his delivery with coaches on Wednesday, Burke thinks the breaking ball command is at most, adjacent to the heart of the matter.
"To some extent it's my fastball command, because pairing the breaking balls off the fastball matters too," Burke said. "The fastball sets the plane that the breaking balls come off of. I'm not really getting my fastball to good spots right now, and that's probably what's sticking out from last year to this year, not getting them to the same spots as I was. [An elevated breaking ball] is an easier mistake to get away with [when you're commanding the fastball up] than when your fastballs are just too high out of the zone, because then they're not really coming out of the same tunnel."
Elevated misses are going to happen with a four-seamer that Burke is trying to dot the very top of the strike zone with, enough that he would actually view being missing above by an inch or so as a good thing. But Burke's 2025 distribution so far has been too sloppy for his taste, and for protecting hitters from jumping on breakers that stay thigh high.
"Mechanically I'm pretty similar to where I should be at, it's just a few small things," Burke said. "My back leg I need to kind of work on, but I think that's more being a little inconsistent with the work the past couple of weeks with the knee kind of bothering me. But that's starting to feel better and that shouldn't be an issue."
Burke was struck in his right knee with an 108 mph comebacker off the bat of Twins right fielder Matt Wallner in his second start of the season, and he anticipated being sore for a while afterward. Since he's on the precipice of starting in Fenway Park, the venue he grew up dreaming of playing in as a kid, he's hoping for a return to form quickly.
But while Burke made a point of noting that getting knocked around in the majors is measurably more difficult than when it happened in Double-A in 2022, that experience makes his current struggles less stunning. Up until that point three years ago, Burke felt he had never really been hit before for any sustained stretch, and that any struggles he endured stemmed from wildness or injury. It was then that he learned that pro hitters were good enough to punish him if he wasn't commanding or setting up his arsenal well, no matter how nasty he felt his stuff was and still is.
"This is kind of the same problem here," Burke said. "The walk numbers aren't bad, but my command in the zone is not good. That was kind of what the issue was in 2022. I was getting hit because of similar stuff; not getting my fastball in the right spots and not giving myself a ton of margin for errors with the breaking balls."
The sinker and seam-shifted changeup that Burke has worked to add since late last season need to become reliable weapons against left-handers for the 25-year-old to reach his ceiling. But when it comes to turning it around by his next start, the most reliable path would be restoring his ability to command four-seamers at the top of the zone and throwing his diving curveball off of it.
If there's anything to the adage of it being helpful to experience failure before reaching the major leagues, Burke is looking to leverage it. Just as three good starts at the end of 2024 didn't mean he had it made, three bad ones shouldn't mean his stuff doesn't play up here.
"The shape of everything feels good and the stuff feels good. It's just more so how I'm using it, how I'm setting it up and then the execution of my pitches," Burke said. "I didn't expect to have zero challenges once I came up here. I knew at some point I'd maybe run into some trouble. I'm at that point now where people are starting to adjust. It's about staying calm and not panicking, understanding that my stuff is still good enough to be here. I belong here, it's just making the adjustments I need to make."
