Doc's Morning Line: Figuring out MLB pitching prospects is always a shot in the dark

Nobody knows. When you get right down to it, that’s the truth.

You have your radar guns and your endless piles of numbers. You might even sit in a rickety bleacher behind home plate at some godforsaken baseball palace in the middle of Nebraska. Buy the kid a cheeseburger afterward and try to determine his “makeup.’’ But you don’t really know. Nobody does.

MLB organizations spend millions scouting and signing pitchers. They subsidize “academies’’ in the Dominican Republic. The Reds have three part-time scouts in Australia, mate.

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They talk up the high draft picks, the ones they pay copious amounts of bonus money to sign. We follow those guys diligently, because that’s what they tell us to do. Hunter Greene has been something of a celeb ever since the Reds drafted him.

Maybe in spring training, we’ll write or read a line or two about some undrafted kid pitcher, or some free-agent desperado who has been around the country in 80 days, pitching for independent minor-league teams with silly nicknames.

The Batavia Muckdogs. Uh-huh.

Mr. Muckdog will pitch two innings in a B game in Goodyear, strike out five. A week later, he’s shipped to minor league camp. See ya. Where’s Nick Lodolo?

Then, a professional career of pro striving and pro wandering snags on a stray stroke of luck. The wanderer gets promoted to the big leagues because the big club is in desperate need of a warm arm. He does well. Very well, and suddenly this guy we’ve never heard of has us asking, who is this person and how come he wasn’t here in April? Surely, he’s better than Reiver Sanmartin.

I just described Connor Overton, 28, who started four games and had a 1.82 ERA before a back injury send him to the 60-day DL last month.

Last night, another guy who had hung around the fringes of our awareness made us again sit up and pay attention. Graham Ashcraft is not Connor Overton. He’s 24 and was a 6th-round draft pick. He’s considered the Reds 7th-best prospect by something called MLB Pipeline, whatever that means.

Unlike Overton, Ashcraft is not a Johnny Cash lyric. He hasn’t been everywhere, man. But you get the idea. The Reds promoted him May 20 and he has dazzled since.

They fetched him from ‘Ville, ostensibly to provide bullpen depth. As recently as 2019, Ashcraft was pitching to a 5.63 ERA in college at Alabama-Birmingham. He started last year in High-A Dayton. Last night, he needed just 76 pitches to shut out the D-backs across six innings. In four starts, Ashcraft is 3-0, 1.14. He throws a mid-90s fastball that can approach 100. He has a nice slider, he’s working on a change.

The Diamondbacks couldn’t hit Ashcraft with Mike Trout’s bat.

How does this happen?

He and Overton have been the Reds best starting pitchers. They’ve provided tunnel light. Three months ago, neither was given a chance to make the team. Why? Were they really that overlooked?

I have a call into Reds GM Nick Krall, to discuss.

Now, then. . .

UM, AH, WELL. . . A NYTimes probe claims DeShaun Watson was more in need of, well, something than had previously been revealed:

Watson has said publicly that he hired about 40 different therapists across his five seasons in Houston, but The Times’s reporting found that he booked appointments with at least 66 different women in just the 17 months from fall 2019 through spring 2021. A few of these additional women, speaking publicly for the first time, described experiences that undercut Watson’s insistence that he was only seeking professional massage therapy.

Two grand juries have declined to indict Watson. Civil cases are pending. But common sense suggests that anyone needing 66 different masseuses over 17 months – and who wasn’t in a massive car wreck or had a building fall on his head – just might be seeking something beyond a massage.

The NFL is on it. The league has not announced any suspension, but if Watson is found to have lied to its sleuths, well, anybody know what Johnny Manziel’s up to these days?

Once again, the forever bumbling Browns look like guys with big red noses and gigantic feet.

COLLEGE ISN’T ALWAYS THE ROAD. . . From the Enquirer:

Fewer students are going to college than ever before. In Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere. The New York Times recently called it the “enrollment crisis.” It might be a reckoning.

Spring enrollment data show this downward trend has continued even as pandemic restrictions across the country have largely been lifted.

The story adds that UC has bucked the trend. Its enrollment continues to grow.

This about that: The smartest person I’ve ever seen was the cook at Tastee Diner in my hometown of Bethesda, MD. Guy could keep track of 10 orders simultaneously, never overcooking the over-easy eggs or burning the toast. Man was a savant.

We’ve tried to make college for everyone. It isn’t. We need master plumbers as much as we need corporate attorneys. If you can fix a fancy car, you don’t need a bachelor of arts. And you’ll make just as much money.

I love tradespeople. They can do stuff I cannot do. Important stuff. The world won’t stop if I miss a few TMLs. It just might if I can’t find a qualified person to patch the hole in my roof.

Blue collars keep the country sane. White collars add to its insanity.

GREG NORMAN’S VERBAL TRIPLE BOGEY. . . Now that Patrick Reed and Bryson DeChambeau seem poised to flee to the Saudi golf tour, it’s worth remembering the words of Norman, who’s overseeing the tour for the bazillionaires who dismember people. Yahoo:

Last month, at a media event to promote the first LIV Golf Series event in London, which is scheduled to tee off this week, Norman, who is the chief executive of the LIV Golf Invitational, funded primarily by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, appeared to downplay the 2018 killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

“Everybody has owned up to it, right?” Norman said, according to London-based newspaper The Times. “It has been spoken about, from what I’ve read, going on what you guys reported. Take ownership, no matter what it is. Look, we’ve all made mistakes and you just want to learn from those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”

As far as we know, nobody has “owned up’’ to anything, and Khashoggi is still dead.

And for the record, dismembering a human being is not a “mistake.’’ Ordering the fish when you wanted the chicken is a mistake.

The players who sign on with the Saudis have cash registers for brains. Their collective conscience is the size of a ball marker.

TUNE O' THE DAY. . . Wisdom from the former Cat Stevens

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft and Reds pitching finding success