Redemption Song: This time last year, Sean Burroughs was known as that dude eating cheeseburgers out of trash cans

Jun 29, 2011, 3:53 PM EDT

Ever wonder what happened to Sean Burroughs, the golden boy third baseman for the San Diego Padres who stormed through life succeeding at a breakneck pace only to get stopped cold when he reached the majors? Well, he’s back, and is trying to make a baseball comeback (he made the Diamondbacks roster but was waived on June 19). Still, being in the minors is better than where he was before.

When you’ve won a Little League World Series at age 12, been drafted by MLB in the first round at age 17 and then won an Olympic Gold Medal at age 20, facing the specter of possible failure for the first time can be a confusing thing to wrangle. So what did Burroughs do? He lost all hope and headed for the ditch.

When Burroughs was 21, he was in the major leagues with Sports Illustrated touting him as the year’s can’t miss prospect. “Life is about experiencing everything you can,” he told the magazine. “I don’t know how my baseball career will go, but I know I want my life to be an adventure.”

Boy was he right.

By the time Burroughs was 29, he was out of baseball, checking in and out of the cheapest motels he could find, wandering the streets of Las Vegas at all hours and abusing every substance he could ingest. He says he was living a “Leaving Las Vegas” existence, a reference to the Oscar-winning and thoroughly depressing Nicolas Cage movie about a man who commits lengthy suicide via alcohol abuse. Burroughs says he was so desperate and paranoid that if you picked a couple particularly bad days in 2010, you could find this Little League hero, this Olympic gold medalist, this former big leaguer … eating cheeseburgers out of garbage cans.

Eating cheeseburgers out of garbage cans is ‘desperate and paranoid’?! I call that ‘thrifty’.

“I didn’t pick up a weight or walk into a gym for 2½ years,” Burroughs said. “It was just one of those crazy kind of diets where I was drinking eight Slurpees a day and eating an In-N-Out burger whenever I could. I weighed 260 pounds or whatever [he weighs about 220 now]. I was out of shape with big, black bags under my eyes. Bad hair, hadn’t shaved for weeks on end. Hadn’t taken vitamins. Hadn’t eaten anything other than french fries and Slurpees.

At the heights of Burroughs’ excess, he wouldn’t return phone calls for months and spent most of his days shuffling between ‘rat motels’, trying to consume any substance he could get his hands on. And then, one day, the light flipped back on and he felt like playing baseball again. And now he’s hitting .412 for the Triple-A Reno Aces, just one injury away from returning to the major leagues, where he’s already spent a month this season with the Arizona Diamondbacks, where he hit .250 as a pinch hitter.

So remember, if you ever find yourself at the bottom of your barrel, hopelessly eating cheeseburgers out of a dumpster, check to see if you’re a former major league first round pick who’s dad was a major league MVP, get your butt off the street and call your agent. The rest of you? I dunno. I hope your burger tastes alright.