The Season That Stopped Working

Burnes had not reached the Major Leagues by accident.

In 2018, he made 30 relief appearances for Milwaukee and posted a 2.61 ERA, according to his MLB player profile. The Brewers reached Game 7 of the National League Championship Series that fall.

But success in one role does not automatically prepare an athlete for the next one.

In a 2022 interview posted by mental-performance coach Brian Cain, Burnes said that early in his Major League career he had pitched mostly on “sheer adrenaline and talent.” As he took on a starting role in 2019, he tried to carry the same approach forward. “I learned real quick that it takes a lot more than that to pitch in the big leagues,” he said.

In early 2019, Burnes’s four-seam fastball was hit for extreme damage. Jay Jaffe’s FanGraphs analysis reported a 1.000 slugging percentage against the pitch through his first four starts. His slider could still miss bats, but the larger plan was not working well enough against Major League lineups.

Starting asks a pitcher to give hitters more than one look. It also asks him to prepare for individual opponents, manage throwing and recovery work, and keep one difficult outing from shaping every day before the next one.

Burnes later said baseball had become “everything” in his life. He needed a separator between the game and everyday life, Bill Ladson reported for MLB.com.

The issue was not that Burnes had stopped working. The challenge had changed. His pitching approach and between-start routine needed to change with it.

When the level, role, or schedule changes, athletes often learn that the routine that got them there does not automatically prepare them for what comes next.

The Question He Could Not Answer

In August 2019, while the season was still unfolding, Burnes met with Cain in Arizona. In Cain’s later account, their first work began with a basic question: What did Burnes do in the days between starts?

Burnes did not yet have a complete answer.

In Cain’s account, he and Burnes began mapping the time from one outing to the next—the roughly 120 hours before a starting pitcher takes the mound again. Jeff Passan’s 2023 ESPN profile later described Burnes building a detailed script for that span. The fuller routine took shape across the offseason and into Spring Training 2020.

Cain’s first assignment was simple: make the bed each morning.

The task did not change the shape of a cutter or solve a Major League lineup. It gave Burnes one completed responsibility before the day’s demands arrived. After a season in which much had felt out of control, the first assignment centered on something he could control completely.

From there, Burnes built a more deliberate plan around preparation, effort, review, recovery, attention, and response.

Cain described the work as extending beyond game day. Burnes practiced present-moment focus in workouts, meetings, recovery, and shadow bullpens—low-intensity rehearsals of a pitcher’s delivery and between-pitch routine without throwing a full bullpen. Cain also described routines for the morning of a start, the night after it, and moments after a bad call, walk, or hit.

Burnes did not have to invent the framework alone. Cain supplied structure. Burnes had to carry it into the daily work.

A Routine Built Between Starts

Burnes’s preparation did not live in one notebook.

In a 2024 Baltimore Banner profile, Burnes described three separate files: one for what he did at the field, one for start-to-start keys to success, and one for reviewing pitch execution. The system gave separate places to document daily work, carry forward priorities, and study what happened on the mound.

The Banner also reported that Burnes used a short daily focus and end-of-day reflection. The point was not to create empty positivity. It was to keep attention on preparation and the next action rather than the last result.

Burnes also used what he called a “pitching secrets” journal. In his interview with Cain, he described it as an all-in-one record for daily routines, start-day information, scouting reports, mechanical cues, and reflections on what was going well and what needed improvement. He might record a few notes after a game, but the deeper review came the next day, when he watched video and began planning the work before his next start.

The result could be acknowledged without becoming the entire evaluation. The review happened after the first emotional response had time to settle.

In a September 2021 MLB.com interview with Sophia Minnaert, Burnes described how exact that review became. He watched every pitch, compared the intended pitch and target with the pitch he actually threw, and calculated an execution percentage.

His usual target was roughly 78 to 80 percent. Through 24 starts in 2021, Burnes said he had reached that range 18 times. His lower starts could fall into the 65 to 70 percent range.

The percentage gave him information that the line score could hide.

A pitcher can throw six innings, allow two runs, and strike out 10 hitters while still missing too many intended targets. The traditional numbers may look excellent, but the review can reveal a priority for the next work block. The reverse is also possible: a disappointing result can contain better execution than the final score suggests.

On Sept. 10, 2021, Burnes explained that review system to Minnaert. Two days later, he took a perfect game into the seventh inning and finished a combined no-hitter against Cleveland on a career-high 115 pitches, as Adam McCalvy reported for MLB.com. Burnes later said that start graded at 78 percent execution.

The box score recorded a no-hitter. Burnes’s notebook still asked the same question: How well did I execute the plan?

Years later, he explained what the system changed for him: “It’s freed me up. I don’t have to look at box scores and results to know how I’m doing because when I break down my outing, I’ll know. I’ll give myself a score and know what I need to work on,” he told Pitcher List.

That was his second scoreboard.

The first scoreboard recorded the result. The second helped him evaluate what he could prepare for, execute, and improve.

Burnes told Sophia Minnaert for MLB.com and, later, Ben Verlander on FOX Sports that his routine included breathing techniques, concentration work, scouting reports, visualization, reading, and a repeatable five-day plan. He said he read a chapter of Harvey Dorfman’s The Mental ABCs of Pitching each morning, with special attention to its chapter on execution on bullpen and start days.

These tools did not remove uncertainty from the game. They gave Burnes a way to arrive prepared and return his attention to the next pitch when uncertainty arrived.

“I’m never worried because I know I’m prepared,” Burnes told Verlander on FOX Sports.

What Hitters Saw

The notebook gave Burnes a clearer way to prepare and assess his work. It did not change what hitters saw. That required another part of the rebuild.

The mental work did not make Burnes’s cutter move. The baseball work did.

Adam McCalvy’s 2022 MLB.com profile placed the turnaround in a wider frame: a reworked arsenal, extensive mental-skills training, LASIK surgery, and Burnes’s ongoing commitment to preparation. This feature follows the routine because it offers the clearest transferable lesson—not because it was the only factor in his rise.

After 2019, Burnes moved away from the four-seam fastball that had been hit hard and built a cutter-led attack. He also used a sinker more heavily while keeping the slider as a key pitch. Mike Petriello reported for MLB.com and Ben Clemens wrote for FanGraphs about the move from a four-seam-heavy approach toward a cutter, sinker, and slider mix.

Pitcher List’s analysis shows how central the cutter became. Burnes used it 31.5 percent of the time in 2020 and 50.4 percent in 2021. The pitch became harder, more distinct from his other offerings, and more difficult to identify beside his slider and curveball.

The change gave hitters more than one problem to solve.

Speaking to Cronkite News, Corbin Carroll described a cutter with ride and horizontal movement, a changeup that begins on a similar plane before moving late, and a curveball that comes from the same slot before dropping sharply. “That guy’s got great stuff,” Carroll said. “He knows how to pitch.”

Burnes paired a more disciplined preparation routine with a more difficult arsenal. One changed the work around performance. The other changed the problem hitters faced during it.

For amateur pitchers, the takeaway is not to copy Burnes’s cutter or change grips because of a profile. The takeaway is to notice when a pitch or approach is not working, use qualified coaching and honest feedback to understand why, and measure whether the next adjustment improves execution.

The Second Scoreboard

A routine cannot guarantee a good start. It can give an athlete a response when a start becomes uncertain.

After a poor pitch, Burnes did not have to create an answer from scratch. After a difficult outing, he did not have to let the line score settle the question of whether he had improved. The next day, he could watch film, score execution, choose a priority, and begin the next work block.

The routine also gave baseball a boundary.

Burnes said the game had become too large in his life after 2019. A defined plan gave baseball a place: at the field, in the review, and during the work set aside to compete and improve.

During the 2022 season, Burnes described the goal in plain language: “For me, every start’s the same, just sticking to my process and going throughout my routine and being as prepared as I can be so when I’m out there, it’s executing pitches and having fun,” he told Adam McCalvy for MLB.com.

The purpose was to keep the last pitch, inning, or outing from taking control of the next decision.

What an Amateur Pitcher Can Borrow

Burnes’s detailed five-day schedule belongs to a Major League starter. The useful principle can fit the time between any two demanding throwing performances—whether a pitcher starts once a week, works twice in a tournament weekend, plays another position, or has school and family obligations around the game.

A simple chart can make the review concrete:

The point is not that a pitcher has only one thing to improve. It is to give the next work session one clear priority. A coach may see several long-term technical needs; a player does not need to carry all of them into the next throw.

The review should also end. Write it down, identify the next step, then return to school, family, sleep, recovery, and ordinary life. Between outings, the work also includes an age-appropriate throwing plan, recovery, sleep, strength work, and honest communication about readiness.

The Routine That Lasted

Burnes did not leave the routine behind when he became a Cy Young winner.

In 2025, Arizona placed him fifth in the rotation to protect the five-day schedule he had built around his preparation. Manager Torey Lovullo said he had not initially understood how important the routine was to Burnes. Lovullo called him “a very routine-oriented player” and said the Diamondbacks needed to respect that plan, according to Steve Gilbert’s MLB.com report.

By then, the pitcher who once had no complete answer for what happened between starts had built a routine that a new organization chose to protect.

Burnes’s father, Rick, had watched the longer climb from Bakersfield to the Cy Young Award. In McCalvy’s 2022 MLB.com interview, he described his son’s path as a mix of ability, competitiveness, later physical development, work, and help from people along the way. He also understood the logic of the journal: Corbin reviewed each pitch, graded whether it matched the intended pitch and location, and used that record because the line score did not always match the grade in the book.

The system did not erase the result. It made the result only one part of the evaluation.

For parents and coaches, leaving the result at the field does not mean pretending it did not happen. It means choosing a calmer time to review it, so the athlete can learn without feeling that one outing controls the whole household.

A short post-performance note is enough to begin:

That will not make a young pitcher Corbin Burnes. It offers a better next step than “work harder” or “hope it goes better next time.”

Burnes’s career did not turn because of one made bed, one journal entry, one pitch, or one change in thought. It changed as he built a more deliberate preparation routine and a more difficult pitching approach for Major League hitters.

For a young pitcher, the version may fit in a notebook: one honest review, one controllable target, and one next action before the next time the ball is in hand.

Coaching Boundary

Editorial Disclosure and Methodology

This independently sourced editorial feature is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Corbin Burnes, the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Milwaukee Brewers, Major League Baseball, or any source referenced in the article. It is published for educational purposes and contains no product recommendation or product call to action.

This feature synthesizes public interviews, official MLB reporting, named-source journalism, and pitch-analysis reporting. It does not rely on private medical information, unpublished journal entries, or invented scenes. Details from Brian Cain’s materials are attributed to Cain because he worked with Burnes and sells mental-performance coaching services.