When the White Sox drafted Zack Burdi with the 26th overall pick in the 2016 draft, where did the team think he would be on Aug. 8, 2020?
The best-case scenario had Burdi helping the White Sox during their last gasp at contending in the Robin Ventura era, but their hopes crumbled before Burdi started matriculating up the organizational ladder.
Limit the exercise to elements directly within Burdi's sphere, and he probably would've been introduced into a major-league role at some point in 2017. Three years later, he either would have been on the verge of his first year of arbitration, or the Sox might have already signed him to an early-career extension in order to keep save totals from inflating his pay scale to amounts worth rethinking.
What they probably didn't envision for August 2020 was Burdi making his major-league debut as a 25-year-old, and without any recent minor-league success to warrant it.
But that's how it happened, thanks to Tommy John surgery, an exceptionally arduous recovery from Tommy John surgery compounded by knee surgery, and a pandemic. One's normal, one's not unheard of, and one's a once-in-a-century occurrence.
The good news? Burdi's promotion didn't look like charity, or necessitated by worldwide calamity. A guy who threw triple-digits in college, then battled for years to even touch 96, sat at 98 mph over the course of his first 12 fastballs in the majors. He generated swinging strikes on four of them, and his changeup had enough juice (91 mph) to register as a two-seam fastball on Statcast.
If you want to keep feeling great, you might not want to ask him how he found what he'd been missing:
Burdi claimed that his stuff just took a jump a month and a half ago after some mechanical tweaks he adapted from a video he saw on Twitter, so perhaps everyone is still adjusting to his new reality.
“Not long is the short answer,” Burdi said of how long his stuff has looked the way it did Saturday. “It kind of brought everything back together, and I was able to feel myself riding down the mound again, and the way my arm was working three years ago was all coming back.”
Burdi isn't out of the woods yet. Even before Tommy John surgery, the White Sox were reluctant to use him on consecutive days, and he didn't pitch well in the few such appearances he made. His introduction to the majors is also his reintroduction to competitive pitching, so he's likely going to be used in a cautious manner.
But the debut is a triumph enough for one of the many, many fine products from Downers Grove South High School, made sweeter by the fact that it stopped being a given somewhere along the way.
Burdi might benefit more than anybody else with regards to the preservation of the 28-man roster, because it's pretty easy to find a hiding spot in a 10-man bullpen until a situation is conducive, provided there aren't three other guys bickering behind the curtain over which one needs to leave.
Ideally, Burdi finds a way to be a big part of a White Sox bullpen, even if it's one rebuilding cycle later than the team intended. Ideally, the White Sox see how else they've been able to amass their other promising arms and understand that a relief-only profile isn't a good use of first-round resources:
- Codi Heuer (sixth round)
- Aaron Bummer (19th round)
- Evan Marshall (non-roster invitee)
- Jimmy Cordero (waivers)
(And while it's premature to lump Matt Foster in with this group due to lesser stuff and/or a shorter track record, he's struck out nine batters over his first 5⅔ innings, which means he's already exceeded all expectations for a guy picked 19 rounds after Burdi.)
The Sox are doing well enough with relievers to make Burdi's renaissance-by-Twitter more of a curiosity than a cry for help, even if he's one of two first-round Humpties Dumpty the Sox couldn't restore on their own. The good news is that there's no correlation between what the White Sox invest in a reliever and what they get out of him, which is also the bad news.
Burdi's status has been so volatile over the last four seasons that it's hard to project him beyond his next appearance. That said, if Burdi's comeback has staying power, this most indirect of paths stands a chance of helping the Sox twice over: Burdi would give the Sox sorely needed production from a first-round draft pick while encouraging the Sox to avoid making such a first-round pick again.
