D.C.'s Major Player

After a prolific high school career in which he starred in both baseball and basketball, Burriss wound up at Kent State, a Division I school in Ohio that maintained a prolific pipeline of Washington area football players. Saah sent him away with one piece of advice: Watch out for the basketball coach; he's going to want you to be his point guard.

Sure enough, Burriss found himself in a pickup game with some members of Kent State's hoops team. Within days, he was fighting off not only the basketball coach, but the football coach as well.

"The football coach was like, 'Come return kicks for me,' and the basketball coach was like, 'Come play point guard for me,' " Burriss said. "I thought about playing hoops. But with my grades, I needed to choose one sport and stick with it, and for me that was baseball. And also, as a kid from D.C., if a [baseball] scout sees that I'm also playing basketball, he's going to automatically assume I'm just a basketball player who plays baseball in his spare time. I wanted people to know I'm a baseball guy."

After three years at Kent State, and a pivotal summer season in the prestigious Cape Cod League following his sophomore year, Burriss was taken in the supplemental first round of the 2006 draft, 33rd overall, by the San Francisco Giants, and he signed within two weeks.

* * *

'We've Got a Special Kid'

The Giants figured Burriss's arrival date in the majors might be around Opening Day 2009, but that timetable was hastened by his performance this spring in his first big league camp, and two weeks into his season at Class AAA Fresno, Burriss, 23, was called up to the majors. And while playing time has been sparse, the 6-foot, 190-pound switch-hitter is a perfect 4 for 4 in stolen base attempts and already has one indelible moment, a leadoff double in the top of the 13th that led to the winning run against the San Diego Padres on April 23.

"We think we've got a special kid here who can help us at the big league level," Giants Manager Bruce Bochy said. "He has all the tools to be a real nice major league player."

Few if any of Burriss's teammates know his back story, about D.C. and Wills and the 38-year gap, or the 180-foot fence at Wilson High, or the white coaches he encountered along the way who thought they needed to teach him the game's rudimentary concepts because he was black -- or how, back in D.C. during Thanksgiving break his sophomore year at Kent State, his best friend and former Wilson teammate, DeLoren Young, was killed by a bullet to the head that was meant for someone else.

"They have no idea," Burriss said. "They really have no idea."

Occupying that perilous territory between the minor leagues and an established spot on the big league roster, Burriss knows he is a couple of botched grounders or a handful of overmatched at-bats -- or a return to health of veteran shortstop Omar Vizquel -- from being sent back down to Fresno.

His only wish is to be on the Giants' roster the first weekend in June, when the team travels to Washington for four games. If he had 25 friends and family members watching him in Philadelphia this weekend, where the Giants are playing the Phillies, he would have a hundred or more here in the District.

And there's one other thing he wants to do that weekend.

Ever since Young's death, Burriss has always said he would take the ball from his first major league hit -- which, at present, resides for safekeeping in the office of the Giants' equipment manager in San Francisco -- and take it with him to D.C., where he would bury it at his best friend's gravesite. And that's what he intends to do.

The symbolism may be unintentional, but would be apt nonetheless: There, in the deep brown dirt of the District of Columbia, Burriss will plant this baseball like a seed. And if it never bears any fruit -- well, the city will be no more starved for big leaguers than it has been for most of the last half-century.