The weather was oddly appropriate. There was a haze on the city skyline and a white, bleached-out quality to the sunlight; it had all the characteristics of a hot midsummer afternoon. Yet the temperature was actually a bit brisk, especially, of course, near the lake but even downtown away from the water, on the south side at Comiskey Park. In the sun, it was fine, but in the shade the wind cooled and forced the fans to keep their jackets on. If only it had been an autumn afternoon, Indian summer, rather than late spring, the metaphor would have been perfect.
Burns was pick of the litter in the last group of young White Sox pitchers, the set before Jack McDowell and Melido Perez. He stepped into the White Sox rotation in 1980 and won 15 games, with an ERA under 3.00, and in the strike-shortened following season he won 10 games with an ERA of 2.64, both of which placed among the league leaders. An essential portion of his playing character was defined, also, in 1981, when he commuted to and from what would become his father’s deathbed while making his regular starts for the Sox. (His fattier had been hurt in an auto accident.) He was, at the time, 22 years old, but he was already establishing himself as a tough-luck pitcher.
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The stats and the ages tell their own story eloquently, as usual, but what made Burns a great pitcher, to my mind, was the clear persona he projected on the field. He is a large man (larger now), and he stood on the mound in what we referred to in art class as the dehanchement pose, in which most of the subject’s weight is rested on one leg, giving the body, supposedly, a graceful S-curve from bottom to top . With Burns, this slow shifting of weight from one leg to the other had no classical resonance; it was, instead, the human equivalent of the jutting hipbones of a cow standing in a field on a hot day, with the sun turning everything a dried-out yellow, the air itself arid and dusty, and with the chirping of crickets providing a strange, nocturnal counterpoint in the middle of the afternoon. There was a feel and weight to the games Britt Burns pitched; he could cast a spell over an afternoon and put us all down south, where he had come from, where people move at a slower pace and the sun seems to hover, utterly still, in the middle of the sky. No other pitcher brought with him such a sense of place and character and communicated it so well.
With the acquisition of Tom Seaver, Burns offered to go to the bull pen in 1984, with the result that he messed up his pitching motion and had his worst season by far. He came back in 1985 to win 18 games, but by that time Hoyt was gone, Richard Dotson was out with a career-threatening injury, and the Sox were again also-rans. He was traded to the New York Yankees in the off-season but never pitched for them. A spurt of growth as a child had left him with poor legs–where some basketball players develop knee problems as kids, Burns developed hip problems–and here they finally caught up with him. The poor hips that had forced him to forever shift his weight from one leg to another finally failed to support his pitching, and he retired.
Back at the batting cage, before the game began, Mark Fidrych was throwing the forkballs, curves, and change-ups that were his arsenal in the years after his arm blew out at the age of 22 (he pitched only 58 major-league games in his career, over 100 fewer than Burns). Northrup watched a change-up go by outside and he turned to the players standing around and said, “See me lay off that puke?”
