Watching Hunter Greene pitch is like watching a luxury car drive directly into a brick wall at top speed; the engineering is undeniably impressive, but the end result is just a total disaster. Every time he hits triple digits on the radar gun, the Cincinnati Reds front office probably lets out a collective sigh of relief that they do not have to explain his existence to the fans for another week. He has become the poster child for the modern baseball obsession with velocity over actual, you know, winning.

While the pundits drool over his spin rate and pitch speed, the team remains firmly planted in the basement of the division, waiting for some kind of statistical miracle that never arrives. - Drafted second overall in 2017 with the expectation of being a franchise savior. - Consistently records pitches over 100 mph while simultaneously walking the entire opposing lineup.

- Has become the most expensive experiment in the Reds pitching rotation. The real issue here is the disconnect between being a highlight-reel curiosity and being an actual major league contributor. Greene occupies a weird space where he is simultaneously the most promising arm in the building and the most frustrating to watch when things inevitably go south in the fifth inning.

He represents a broader trend of organizations falling in love with raw data points while ignoring the inconvenient truth that baseball is still played on grass, not in a spreadsheet. It is hard to build a dynasty when your supposed ace functions like a pyrotechnic display that burns out before the fireworks show even begins. Will we ever see this potential actually translate into something resembling a playoff push, or are we just going to keep pretending that a high-velocity strikeout is worth more than an actual win?

Maybe if the front office spent as much time on their scouting as they do on their exit velocity metrics, they would not be the laughingstock of the National League.