It’s been five years since a teenaged, two-way baseball player named Hunter Greene graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. At the time, Greene was starring for Notre Dame High in Sherman Oaks, CA, where he repeatedly hit triple digits on the radar gun.
The cover story posed a very simple question: is Greene destined to become baseball’s version of LeBron James?
The Cincinnati Reds wanted to find out for themselves. They selected Greene with the No. 2 overall pick in 2017 and gave him a $7.23 million signing bonus to pass on a scholarship to UCLA and head straight to pro ball. Finally on Sunday, on a team in the midst of a rebuild, Greene took the mound for his Major League debut and showed why MLB Pipeline ranked him the No. 4 right-handed prospect in baseball.
