Everybody's Top Prospect.

Life for Sean Burroughs was harder than it looked.

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The cause of death is often the thing. We certainly ask about it, or at least usually we do, and especially when we feel like we know somebody because they were famous for a while. It may or may not be morbid, but it is a curiosity.

So for the record, Sean Burroughs, two-time Little League World Series champion, MLB first-round pick, son of a former MLB star, Olympic gold medalist, died on Thursday of last week because he suffered cardiac arrest. Burroughs had dropped off his son at the Little League fields in Long Beach and went to park his car, and that’s where he was found, collapsed next to the car.

Sean’s son, Knox, is 6 years old. Sean was 43. Survivors include Sean’s mother, Debbie, who is the reason we already know the cause of death, as it became her sad duty to fill in the local media when they asked what happened.

She felt she should say something, because everybody in Long Beach knew Sean.

And, really, that’s about it, as far as the known.

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People tend to get caught up in the the what of sports, and I suppose that’s because it is easier than thinking about the why. You can reduce games and outcomes to statistical analyses, and that keeps them at a safe distance. It can be fun without becoming too human.

But why people compete, why they want to win at something, or be the best — that’s the sweet spot. That’s where the mystery lies. And it’s not easy to get down in those emotional lanes; the work gets harder.

I knew Sean Burroughs only a little, and only professionally. He was a guy I wrote about sometimes. But I felt like I knew him better than that, and so did hundreds of thousands of sports fans, maybe millions, because we first “met” him as a kid.

He was the grinning, cherubic, quick-witted son of Jeff Burroughs, himself a former American League MVP. When Sean became a Little League legend in Long Beach in the early 1990s, his coach was his famous-ballplayer dad. How about that? Father and son together, turning out to be part of something so special that Long Beach went to the Little League World Series twice in a row — and won it both years.

Sean was the star. The world loved him. He did things like this:

And then he went on to high school, and again he was the star. He was the first-round draft pick of the San Diego Padres when he was 17 years old.

He was a can’t-miss, an athletic 1 percenter. He was on the U.S. Olympic gold-medal winning baseball team in 2000. It was an incredible ride.

He got his first big-league call-up two years later, age 21. In his first full season, he hit .286. There was some chatter about “the next Tony Gwynn.”

And then the next season came.

And then — and then. And then.

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By the time he was 29, Burroughs was out of the sport and personally wrecked. The late Jim Caple once wrote for ESPN that by then, Burroughs “was 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.”

Burroughs had indeed made the major leagues all those years earlier, but he never developed into the power-hitting masher that the scouts had decided he should be. He spent a few years with the Padres, then a year in Tampa. He got released by the Rays, signed a Triple-A deal with Seattle, played exactly four games in Tacoma, quit the sport entirely at age 26, and descended into a dark, drug-filled period that lasted years.

Burroughs described that time in his life as a “Leaving Las Vegas scenario,” and if you get the movie reference, you know. It was bad. It took a couple of years at rock bottom before he began to climb out — and even then, at age 30, he was enough of a physical baseball genius to make it all the way back to the big leagues with Arizona and then Minnesota.

But it turned out that Sean Burroughs had loved the game far less than the level at which he played it. He had loved succeeding — winning. Not baseball, exactly. His former agent, Joel Wolfe, told ESPN that because being good at the sport had come so easily to Sean, he may not have been prepared for when it got hard — and it always gets harder as you go up the ladder.

“As soon as he had to deal with repetitive failure,” Wolfe said, “the wheels started to come off.”

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Some years ago, I spent a summer in Toms River, N.J., a place that through the decades had appeared in the Little League World Series with a regularity that defied the size of the town. It seemed like they sent a team to Williamsport all the time. But it wasn’t something in the water; it was this tradition of expectation, handed down one year over the next. Going to Williamsport, the LL World Series, was supposed to happen.

You would push for Little League glory in Toms River — as a 12-year-old. That was the thing you were bound to do. It was what Toms River always did.

The book that I wrote about the town is called “Six Good Innings” (here’s a link to its Amazon page), and it’s one of a couple I've written that have dug deeper into this idea of what it’s like to have folks expecting you to be great when you’re still figuring out your life. Though I try, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like for those who actually do achieve that peak — athletically, at least — at age 12, or 18, or even their early 20s. What happens then?

It takes me back to the why of sports, not the what.

What we really know about Sean Burroughs isn’t so much, other than to say that his life was probably always harder than it looked. More complicated, certainly. He did make it all the way back, and by all accounts he was a loving father. He died at Little League and not somewhere else partly because he was parking the car to go help coach his son’s team. The players loved Coach Sean, it turns out.

I hope he found peace. That thing about being great when you’re a kid — it’s great. And then you get older. And then.