As a White Sox fan, I can't help but anticipate the worst. You're probably much the same. With very few exceptions, it's been a reliable strategy over the franchise's less-than-illustrious history. This season as a whole is a perfect macro example; meanwhile, Michael Kopech's stupid knee reminds us that we can't have nice things in the micro. So even though Jake Burger has been one of 2022's very few pleasant surprises, I dream less about the great things he might eventually accomplish and more about how it all might come crumbling down.
Will the league find a fatal hole in his swing? Will his Achilles pop again? Will Tony La Russa kick him off the team because he won't shave his sideburns?
Heck, since I started writing this post he left Monday's game with an injured hand! (Thankfully, he appears to be day-to-day... although that phrase appears not to mean much to this franchise.)
It stinks my brain works this way, particularly when it comes to a fun surprise like Burger. But there are too many examples of similar White Sox stories: decent-to-good prospects who pop up with a high-SLG, low-OBP rookie season, then flame out because they lack plate discipline.
And look, I really hope this doesn't happen to Burger. His story of resilience is inspiring. He hits monster dingers. But let's be real, the guy had a .681 OPS against righties entering Monday's game, and he got sent down to AAA a few weeks back because he couldn't hit a beach ball at the time. It would not be shocking to see his career turn out something like Josh Fields.
That worry spurred me to look into whether there was anything in Burger's basic statistical profile to obviously differentiate him from the type of guy I'm thinking of. So I took to Baseball Reference and found six White Sox seasons from the Kenny Williams era that roughly match Burger's current production. My (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) parameters: guys in their first or second year with an OPS+ above 100, a SLG above .480, and an OBP below .335 in at least 30 games played.
| Player | Year | Age | G | OBP | SLG | BB% | K% | OPS+ |
| Jake Burger | 2022 | 26 | 37 | .326 | .515 | 6.3% | 29.6% | 137 |
| Eloy Jiménez | 2020 | 23 | 55 | .332 | .559 | 5.3% | 24.8% | 137 |
| Dayan Viciedo | 2010 | 21 | 38 | .321 | .519 | 1.9% | 23.6% | 128 |
| Gavin Sheets | 2021 | 25 | 54 | .324 | .506 | 8.9% | 22.3% | 125 |
| Eloy Jimenez | 2019 | 22 | 122 | .316 | .513 | 6.0% | 26.6% | 116 |
| Daniel Palka | 2018 | 26 | 124 | .294 | .484 | 6.7% | 34.1% | 111 |
| Josh Fields | 2007 | 24 | 100 | .308 | .480 | 8.4% | 29.9% | 105 |
(Burger's numbers here are through Sunday, 6/12.)
The good news is that entering Monday, Jake Burger was tied with Eloy Jimenez's Silver Slugger-winning 2020 campaign for the best production on this list relative to league average. The overall depressed run-scoring environment this year makes his surface numbers a bit less shiny than Eloy's, but he's been a straight-up elite bat. (He's also besting similarly-shaped, similarly-aged seasons from Carlos Lee and Joe Crede, who were later in their major league careers.)
Otherwise though, this list doesn't seem to bode great things for Burger's future. His plate-discipline numbers look awfully similar to everyone else in the rundle. It's also a group that collectively hit the ball very hard, so scouting-wise we can't say he stands out there. Jiménez was easily the most highly regarded prospect of the bunch, but even he's struggled through injury and consistency issues the last two years. Fields and Palka had deeper swing-and-miss issues than Jake has displayed so far in his career, but that hasn't born out to a massive difference in K or BB numbers. Gavin Sheets has a better eye than Burger, and we've seen how the league has learned to exploit him regardless. Viciedo demonstrates that players of Burger's ilk can become a superstar ... in Japan.
So far, there aren't many obvious differences between Burger and the similar players we've seen in the past. That, of course, does not mean Burger is sunk. There is one major statistical difference between Burger and everyone else on this list:
| Player | Minor League PA Before Rookie Season |
| Daniel Palka | 2416 |
| Eloy Jimenez | 1703 |
| Josh Fields | 1614 |
| Gavin Sheets | 1513 |
| Dayan Viciedo | 903 |
| Jake Burger | 547 |
Burger is matching the best early season among some pretty highly regarded prospects despite virtually no minor0league track record. That's probably the best argument that he might exceed the expectations set by the non-Jiménez guys on this list. And of course, if we expand the sample from the White Sox to all of MLB we can find some more positive results among other largely uninspiring names: Ryan Braun, Todd Frazier, and Dan Uggla all put up early seasons similar to Burger's at around the same age.
However, the bottom line is still that Jake Burger is going to have to continue producing like this for a lot longer to break the mold of some notable recent Sox flameouts. The odds are frankly against him, but at least he hasn't let the odds stop him yet.
