Less than a minute into a phone interview about his offseason, White Sox starting pitcher Sean Burke seemed to be resuming a conversation from last September, mulling over pitch shapes and plans for returning them to prior glory.
The towering 26-year-old right-hander once again spent the bulk of his offseason in Nashville, where fellow Bledsoe clients like Colson Montgomery and Caleb Bonemer train at the agency's complex, and other Sox players like Jonathan Cannon, Tim Elko and Korey Lee also spent their winters. Burke was also in Chicago, layered up and in attendance for Bears' divisional round playoff loss to the Rams last weekend, and claims to have an incredible 50-yard line angled iPhone video of Caleb Williams' miraculous last-minute touchdown pass. But he's also headed out to Arizona next week, both ducking a cold snap and eager to show off what the bulk of his winter has been centered around.
"I've talked with [new White Sox pitching coach Zach] Bove a lot about the slider and the changeup, made a couple of grip adjustments on those two pitches," Burke said. "We just went back and looked at my slider from 2024 to this past year, and saw a couple differences in the movement and how it was. So, just trying to get back to that movement of what it was in 2024."
While September 2024 is mostly remembered on the South Side for the White Sox sealing their place in infamy, Burke still thinks of his four-outing debut that month as the best work of his professional life (19 IP, 12 H, 7 BB, 22 K, 1.42 ERA). Sure, he was healthy and sitting 95 mph after over a year of shoulder woes and rehab, but his slider racked up a ridiculous 43.2 percent miss rate and looked like a culmination of his collegiate work to throw it faster, combined with professional pitch design to give it sharp, gyro shape.
A reminder:
His slider didn't look like that in 2025, dipping to a 26.4 percent whiff rate while opposing hitters slugged .543 against it.
"It was kind of profiling as a slower cutter, it was in between the slider I had in 2024 and too slow to be a cutter," Burke said. "I didn't intentionally change anything, but I felt like a lot of them were staying up, as opposed to getting to the down and away corner."
What made this feel like a continuation of an earlier conversation is that by late September last season, Burke and the White Sox had become convinced that the process of developing his new sinker had sapped his ability to supinate his wrist and snap off his best sliders. The pitch had lost both vertical drop and become more sweeping in shape, so Burke's effort to restore his slider is two-pronged: the new grip from Bove and fewer practice reps of his sinker. Developing his fifth pitch was not worth sacrificing his second.
"I probably throw two per bullpen; I'll throw one while warming up and then I'll end it trying to front hip a lefty," Burke said. "I'm seam-shifting my two-seam. So my wrist position I was almost thinking to throw it like a slider to get that tilted wrist. I think that was what was pulling the slider up with it. So I'm just getting back to the wrist position of what the slider is supposed to feel like, and with the two-seamer, just trusting it's going to move."
As he racked up a serviceable 99 ERA+ in 134⅓ big league innings last year, Burke would inevitably blame his four-seam command for any outing that slid below his larger expectations. It's never a wrong critique; fastball command is the building block to pitching, peppering the top of the zone with his 18 IVB (induced vertical break) four-seamer sets up everything in Burke's arsenal, and he's no surgeon just yet, so there was usually room for improvement. But his offseason has been geared around improving his secondaries, so they can give him more room with which to work.
Burke said that Bove called him within days of being hired and the two speak every few weeks -- "His demeanor and everything is pretty similar to [Ethan] Katz," Burke said -- often exchanging video of right-hander's adaptation of a new one-seam changeup grip (similar to what Shane Smith uses) that Brian Bannister helped pick as the new route for the pitch. Whereas previously the Sox had sought to give Burke something in his arsenal that moves to the arm side, assuming his sinker can do that job, the concern now is much more about straight, downward action that tunnels off his fastball.
"I'm never going to be a guy who gets to the zero line (IVB) like Davis [Martin] and Shane get to on their changeups, just because of [the arm slot] I throw from, but the speed differential and [vertical separation] are going to be the biggest things for me," Burke said. "I kind of split the one-seam with my fingers and the way the ball comes out, I don't feel like I have to manipulate it at all. It feels natural and I feel like I can throw the ball and keep everything in the middle of the plate. Like with my fastball and curveball, my thought process is to try to stay through the middle of the plate with it and try to play more of the up-and-down game with it."
Fastballs up and secondaries tumbling off of them is the basic plan Burke has to execute to hold his spot in the White Sox rotation as competition mounts on the horizon. But watching Yoshinobu Yamamoto carve up the Blue Jays in the World Series by pulling off that same visual trick at the bottom of the zone--showing an off speed below the the strike zone before freezing hitters with a fastball at the knees--has Burke thinking about further exploring success he's had with that route in the past.
"Yamamoto was dotting those too, at the bottom of the zone," Burke said. "My last game [of 2025] I think it was an at-bat against CJ Abrams where I threw a curveball down that he took and then went to the fastball and tried to nut it at the bottom of the zone, but it was probably two or three balls up from the bottom of the zone and he still took it, because it was still coming out of the same lane. So it's understand an at-bat like that tells you it doesn't even need to be perfect."
There's a scenario where the return of Drew Thorpe and Mason Adams, or the arrivals of Noah Schultz, Hagen Smith and Tanner McDougal push some people out of the White Sox rotation, but no, Burke obviously does not need to be perfect. But simply on his own terms and for his own expectations, Burke looks at league average results in his first full season and an August demotion to Triple-A as setbacks he has to learn from so they're not repeated.
"It's important to understand you're going to get your ass kicked sometimes," Burke said. "It's beneficial to learn from those experiences. I had the same thing in college, kind of the same thing each level of minors going up in Double and Triple-A, and it's been necessary to grow and learn and figure out what you need to do to be successful, and what you do that gets you into trouble, and how to avoid that, and how to grow from that. The confidence hasn't wavered or shrunk, it's just knowing more about who I am as a pitcher and what it takes to be successful."
