Glimpse of the future: The unlikely path of Ryne Miller

There were few surprises among the list of participants in the Red Sox’ Rookie Development Program.

There was Casey Kelly, the first-rounder who is considered the top pitching prospect in the system. Jose Iglesias, the former member of the Cuban junior national team who signed with the Sox for $8.25 million, shared center stage.

Junichi Tazawa and Che-Hsuan Lin, among the most prominent amateurs to come out of Japan and Taiwan, also participated. So, too, did Ryan Kalish and Josh Reddick, the outfielders who have been considered among the top prospects in the system for the past few years.

The group was comprised primarily of the highest-profile players in the Sox’ minor league system. For most of the 12 participants, the notion that a big league future lies just a season or two away came as anything but unexpected.

Yet for at least one program participant, inclusion in such a category seemed almost unfathomable. After all, just four years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Ryne Miller in professional baseball, let alone with a vision of a major league pitching future. Even Miller found it difficult to believe that he was in Boston as a prelude to a possible big league future.

“I don’t think highly of myself. I feel like I’m the low guy on the totem pole,” Miller said. “There are a lot of good players in this organization.”

Yet Miller, improbably, has quietly made a case that he is one of them.

FROM TWO-SPORT ATHLETE TO NO-SPORT ATHLETE

Miller had quit baseball in 2003, after his junior year of high school, to focus on a football career. It would be hard to consider the choice shocking.

Miller, after all, had grown up in Odessa, Texas, and started his prep career (before his family moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area during his junior year) at Permian High School. He was very much a part of the culture of the city and school that offered the subject of Buzz Bissinger’s "Friday Night Lights."

The lure of football seemed all but irresistible. And so, after receiving a scholarship offer to play quarterback at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Miller walked away from the diamond.

But college football didn’t go exactly as planned. Miller enrolled at Louisiana-Monroe, but the team wanted to move him from quarterback to tight end during spring practices of his freshman year.

Miller ended up leaving school and going home. What awaited him was uninspiring.

“I spent a year out of school, didn’t do anything. I just worked,” Miller said. “I was a porter in an apartment complex, cleaning the grounds, cleaning the pool. In July in Texas, it’s about 100 degrees. I looked up at the sun and said, ‘I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life.’ ”

Miller told his father that he wanted to go back to school, and his dad agreed to bankroll the decision. He enrolled at Texas' Weatherford College in 2006.

Roughly three years after he’d last played baseball, he walked onto the baseball team before earning a scholarship for the spring semester. The team asked him to throw sidearm, and he ended up working as Weatherford’s closer.

GETTING DISCOVERED

In the summer of 2007, he pitched in the Texas Collegiate League. There, he returned to pitching over the top in an effort to generate more velocity.

“We had a kid who was throwing 96, 97. The scouts would always come and watch him. I’d come in after him, and they’d pack up their stuff and leave. So, I’m like, ‘Well, nobody knows who I am,’ ” Miller said. “I went back over the top, and I don’t know how it happened, but it just came easy.”

The right-hander pitched well, earning a spot on the TCL All-Star team for a contest attended by scouts from virtually every major league team. In that game, Miller opened eyes. He had never exceeded 91 mph, but that day he touched 96 while striking out both of the batters he faced.

Evaluators noticed, including Red Sox area scout Jim Robinson. He