They put him on a bubblegum card when he was 11, which is generally 11 years early, and the most decent thing they did was leave off his height and weight. He was 5'5", 170 pounds back then -- "Ate whatever they put in front of me," he says -- and that's why there was the Sean Burroughs shift: Everybody move back!

He was a fat boy with fast-twitch muscles, which meant one thing: His Little League team was going all the way. The 1992 West Regional final came down to one last lick, with him facing a Hawaiian pitcher who threw 81 mph (big league equivalent: 110), and his whole dugout knew they'd better duck. He put both fists on his bat, pounded the plate six times -- "to summon the home run gods," he says -- and slammed a fastball 250 feet to win the game.

"Pretty much whenever he summoned the home run gods, the home run gods listened," says his coach from then, a lawyer named Larry Lewis. "He was like Mighty Casey, except he didn't strike out."

Most 170-pound 11-year-olds aren't this charismatic, but Sean Burroughs (a.k.a. Sausage, The Boy, Burly, Soft Luck, Seany B or Bob) seems to have had a nickname for every day of the week. They called him Sausage (or Sauce for short) because he was shaped like one, and the charm of it all was that he'd laugh it off -- then get even. A buddy of his, Steve Isbell, was pitching for an opposing Little League team one day, and when the score got lopsided, Burroughs asked him to groove a fastball. Isbell nodded, but double-crossed him and threw a curve. "And Sauce still hit it out of the park by 100 feet," says Isbell. "He's running the bases laughing."

In that entire 11-year-old season, the fat boy with the hockey haircut never struck out once. Eventually he led his Long Beach, Calif., team to consecutive Little League World titles. Not only did he bat .600 and toss a pair of 16-strikeout no-hitters during the second title run, but he raised hell in the streets afterward. One day, Burroughs hijacked a tournament golf cart and slalomed all over town. Another night, he pulled a fire alarm after midnight, prompting six Williamsport fire trucks to surround the player dorms.

"He was a little s--," says his old teammate, Dane Mayfield. Except Sean Burroughs wasn't little. Five-five, one-seventy! He dominated as much as Danny Almonte, and, because he was the son of the 1974 AL MVP, Jeff Burroughs, he was labeled a can't-miss prospect. That's all Sauce ever heard. That he can't miss. Can't miss. And that's why David Letterman invited him onto his show back in 1993.

Letterman: "If you can't be a ballplayer when you grow up, what do you want to be?"

Burroughs: "A gynecologist."

***

Fortunately, the only thing he's ever doctored is a baseball. It turns out the can't-miss kid didn't miss, and, in this day and age, that's saying a mouthful. It is 10 years and only 30 pounds later, and Sean Burroughs is the everyday third baseman for the San Diego Padres. Not only is he flirting with a .300 batting average, but he's a chiseled 6'2", 200-pound specimen who swears by the George Foreman grill because it keeps the grease off his meat. He's been hyped for a decade, yet here he is a prime candidate for Rookie of the Year. "Pressure?" says former Triple-A teammate Kevin Eberwein. "Hell, the kid's already been compared to his father and Tony Gywnn."

He's made it because he had a mother who humbled him and a father who was a big league parent instead of a Little League parent. He's made it because his $2.1 million signing bonus is still in the bank, and because he spends his off-seasons in a college dorm. He's made it because his parents kept telling him the sad story of David Clyde.

David Clyde was actually his father's teammate with the Texas Rangers, and David Clyde was a can't-miss kid too. He pitched in the big leagues at 18, straight from high school, and dominated in his debut. But it was too much too soon, and David Clyde was done in by booze and women. He lives on though, in the mantra Jeff and Debbie Burroughs keep repeating to their can't-miss son: Remember David Clyde. Remember David Clyde.

It took more than good parenting to get here. A personal trainer helped, and so did Sean's thick-skinned sense of humor. In Little League, opponents used to say, "Hey batter, hey fat batter, swiiiiiing fat batter," but he wouldn't let them get in his head. Now, in the big leagues, it's the same thing. In his spring training debut, Randy Johnson's first pitch to him was a 97 mph fastball off his right shoulder. Burroughs didn't flinch.

Says Padres general manager Kevin Towers: "In the clubhouse, I said, 'Hey Sean, how you feel?' And he says, 'KT, he's trying to get in my head. But he can't do it. Won't happen.'

"That's how much confidence the kid has," Towers says. "I mean, just the fact that he calls me KT. The year we signed him, I go to A-ball to watch him play, and he goes, 'Hey KT!' I'm the GM of the big league club, but he's ... 'What's going on, KT?' Like we were high school buddies."

But that's Sausage. He wasn't nervous when he'd summon the home run gods in Little League, and he's not nervous now that he's summoning the lousy-single-to-left gods in the majors.

"My son, he's a little odd," Debbie Burroughs says.

***

The first thing he did after the Little League World Series was ... eat spaghetti and meatballs. His parents always refused to put him on a diet, because the idea was to make his childhood as routine as possible. "Plus, it doesn't help that I'm Italian, and I cook, cook, cook," Debbie says. "Food is love around our house, so he was really loved."

They figured he'd either grow out of it or become Greg Luzinski. In the meantime, they hardly emphasized baseball. He would bodyboard every day in the Pacific Ocean, and he even played soccer through his junior year of high school. "The baseball scouts thought we were nuts," Jeff says.

His parents were simply teaching him that, in the scope of things, he was not King Tut. His mother would ask, "Can you sing opera? Can you paint a pretty picture?" When he'd say no, she'd say, "See, you're not so special. Your gift is baseball, but other people have those gifts. Everybody is gifted." It must've worked because he's always been the first off the bench after a teammate's home run. Williamsport, Pa., didn't turn him into an ass. "It's kind of like we brainwashed him," Debbie says.

He became the life of the party, and his buddies called him The Boy, which was his dad's nickname, or Burly, for obvious reasons, or Soft Luck, because he never got into trouble for his pranks. Like the Halloween he was a flasher. He trick-or-treated wearing a trench coat and, for effect, he'd whip it open to expose the salami safety-pinned to his pants zipper.

On the other hand, there were reality checks at home. Debbie was a first-grade teacher in a low-income Latino neighborhood of North Long Beach, and she would often ask Sean to come read to her kids. Some were the children of drug addicts, and Sean Burroughs began to see how the other half lived. "Good luck, Seany B!" the kids would say in unison. Spanish turned out to be his favorite class in high school, and he became practically fluent.

He also figured Spanish would serve him well in baseball, and don't for a minute think he had forgotten about baseball. Somewhere along the way, his body had morphed. By his junior year, he was 6'1", 185. It was then that he got serious about taking extra BP, and he turned into a lefthanded line drive hitter who could spray it to all fields. His batting averages in high school were, in order, .320, .360, .485 and .528, and the Padres took him with the ninth overall pick of the 1998 draft.

He met with a trainer in LA, Steve Zim, who'd attach bungee cords to his legs and hit grounders to him with special four-pound baseballs. "Your first three steps are everything," Zim says. He got Burroughs in shape, but the question was whether he'd sign. He'd been a 3.86 student, and Debbie wanted him in college. He enrolled at USC and moved into the baseball dorm. But the night before his first class -- Spanish -- the Padres offered him a $2.1 million bonus. He took it, but not before making two promises to his parents. First, after buying an Escalade, he had to put all of his bonus in a trust fund until he was 28. Second, he had to return to college in his off-seasons.

"Remember David Clyde," Debbie told him.

He never came off as a bonus baby in the minors. His teammates in Mobile used to chide him about his old Little League physique, and when roommate Eberwein saw an anonymous fat guy on TV named Bob, he waved Burroughs over. "I said, 'Hey, there you are, Bob,'" Eberwein says. "And from that day forward, I called him Bob. Been calling him Bob for two years."

Ever since, Bob has been making the troops laugh. "The guy used to keep his entire wardrobe in his truck," Eberwein says. "Every morning, he'd go out to his truck, pick out an outfit, come back in the apartment, and change."

His parents would occasionally take the team out for a steak dinner -- because their son had no cash -- and Debbie was happy to see Sean was a peon like everyone else. "Nobody likes a big spaccone," she says. "That's the Italian name for big shot." But after he batted .435 at Class-A Rancho Cucamonga and .291 at Double-A Mobile and .375 in the Olympics and .322 at Triple-A Portland, the Padres wanted him in San Diego this season. They wanted the 21-year-old at third base so badly that they asked All-Star third baseman Phil Nevin to move to first base and All-Star first baseman Ryan Klesko to move to rightfield. "I'm saying, 'Why are we moving two All-Stars?' Klesko remembers. "Make him go to the outfield."

It could have been a calamitous situation, but it was nothing a little hazing couldn't solve. Right away, Burroughs was given custody of the team boom box and the accompanying 100 CDs, which he has had to lug around from the bus to the plane to Nevin's hotel room on road trips. "Everyone has to have a chore," Burroughs says.

They couldn't wait to pounce on him. In spring training, he went to his hotel one morning with an upset stomach, but felt well enough by afternoon to go out for a Gatorade. Upon returning to the hotel, he walked by the pool and saw broadcaster Rick Sutcliffe and Sutcliffe's college-age daughter, Shelby, who had brought along some TCU sorority sisters. Burroughs grabbed a lounge chair. When word got back to manager Bruce Bochy that he'd been laying out in the sun, Bochy sicced Nevin on him.

The next day, Nevin & Co. brought an inflatable kiddie pool to the field and made Burroughs stretch in it during calisthenics. They also made him wear water wings, goggles and suntan lotion, and dumped a water bucket on him. A month later, when he hit his first big league homer, they confiscated the actual home run ball and replaced it with a phony ball that had had the cover knocked off of it. "I did that?" Burroughs said. The Padre players liked how well he went along with the joke.

It's almost a baseball axiom: The more screws you've got loose, the more you're one of the guys. After his first regular-season game, Burroughs threw his soiled uniform back into his locker as if he were going to wear it the next day -- instead of into the hamper -- and his teammates cracked up again. "Now I know why they say he loves wearing the uniform," reliever Trevor Hoffman says.

Burroughs has also been seen talking to himself on the team bus, but all he's doing is making up awful rap songs -- which might be why Klesko recently put a shaving-cream pie in his face. "You want an example of my rap?" Burroughs says. "Let's see: 'Seany B's in the house, sitting in the San D with all my boys. Give me a bat, give me my toys ... ' I don't know. It's just freestyle, man."

Either way, the Padres brass think he'll be a Mark Grace with a little more power. They think it because he still answers to Bob. They think it because he calls his mother's first-grade class from his cell phone and has Debbie put them on loudspeaker. They think it because he always has his batting gloves in his back pocket, even at the mall. They think it because when he strikes out, he curses in Spanish. They think it because he lives just three traffic lights from the stadium.

They think it because even when he hits a routine popup, he runs the bases maniacally, just in case. They think it because he remembers a world when he was 5'5", 170 pounds.

Just the other day, in fact, some nonbaseball fan asked him what he did for a living, and Sean Burroughs did not so much as flinch.

"Gynecologist," he said.

This article appears in the May 13 issue of ESPN The Magazine.