Sometimes big-league baseball dreams just don’t work out, even for high draft picks who get million-dollar signing bonuses. That appears to be the story that emerged on Thursday when the South Bend Cubs, a Single-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, handed a left-handed pitcher who was once the organization’s second-round draft pick his walking papers.
The Cubs released 26-year-old Burl Carraway, according to the MiLB.com transactions page. In 2020, the Cubs made Carraway, whose fastball was clocked at 100 mph in his third and final season at Dallas Baptist, the 51st overall pick in a draft that was abbreviated to just five rounds that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carraway was the third-highest draft pick to come out of Dallas Baptist and the first to be chosen for the United States national collegiate team. The southpaw was considered by MLB Pipeline to be “the top relief prospect in the 2020 draft.”
In 2021, his first professional campaign after the pandemic wiped out the 2020 minor league season, MLB Pipeline rated Carraway the No. 18 prospect in the Cubs farm system, and the second-ranked left-handed pitcher.
Carraway and his triple-digit four-seamer from the port side created quite a buzz around Wrigley Field, with Cubs fans in 2020 already calling for the team to call up the fast-rising prospect, just as Chicago’s South Side team, the White Sox, had done with their own first-round draft pick that strange year, another left-hander named Garrett Crochet.
With the minor league season canceled, Carraway was restricted solely to bullpen sessions. He had not even faced a single professional hitter.
But the Cubs, despite making him a respectably high draft pick, perhaps harbored some skepticism about Carraway from the start. They signed him with a bonus of $1.05 million, well below the slot value for pick No. 51. In 2020, that pick was valued by MLB at $1.4 million.
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Then injuries set in. Carraway was limited to only 10 games in 2022, and also according to North Side Baseball writer Jason Ross, developed a case of the yips. The prospect missed all of 2023 and 2024, then found himself on the full-season injured list again this season after just 8 1/3 innings in 10 games, striking out 11 but walking an eye-popping 17, perhaps a result of the yips.
He divided the little time on the mound he had this year between Single-A South Bend and the Arizona Complex League, before receiving his release this week. Where Carraway goes from here is not clear. His baseball journey may have come to an end. Or, with his new free agent status, he could attempt to catch on with another organization, either as a pitcher or perhaps an outfielder — the position for which he was recruited out of A&M Consolidated High School by Dallas Baptist.
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