Kline heads down Interstate 20 on his 160-mile drive from Alabama to Atlanta to catch a plane early the next morning for North Carolina -- a typical travel day as the draft approaches.

Tournaments a goldmine

There wasn’t a cloud in the high sky above Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, and the seats behind home plate at the Southeastern Conference tournament filled with scouts wearing broad-rimmed fishing hats, scouts with wet towels draped over their necks and white zinc smeared on their faces, maybe 60 guys in all. “I’m smokin’,” Kline said. Sweat ran down his neck.

Kline got to the ballpark at 8:30 a.m., an hour before first pitch. When Kentucky and Florida took the field late in the afternoon, he left Mark Baca, another Nationals scout, in the seats behind the plate. Kline needed to get another look at Kentucky’s designated hitter that day, a power-hitting junior named A.J. Reed who normally plays first base. Because Reed hits left-handed, Kline took a seat along the left-field line, a better vantage point from which to see his swing.

“I hope A.J. strikes out four times,” Kline said. “I really do.”

He didn’t want other scouts to learn what he already knew. “He will hit,” Kline said, “and he will hit for power.” But the general managers from the Marlins and the Diamondbacks were each down the left-field line as well, not by coincidence, and they were joined by scouts from the Yankees, the Tigers, on and on. Kline already knew what he thought of “the player” — that’s scout-talk. Late one night when he was home in Arizona, he flipped on one of Reed’s games he had recorded on his DVR. Reed jacked a massive homer clear over the batter’s eye in center field at Tennessee.

“I turned it off,” Kline said. “That was enough.”

So these trips, late in the process of evaluating players for the draft, are about fine-tuning, reinforcing what scouts already thought or raising doubts where none existed. Kline usually feels comfortable that he knows a hitter if he sees eight at-bats. In the first inning, Reed foul-tipped a 2-2 pitch into the glove, a strikeout on a 93-mph fastball. Kline didn’t flinch. Add it to the file.

“People will think this is silly, but as a player, you get in the season and get in a groove, and the game slows down,” he said. “That happens to me. The first week in a hotel, and you’re back at it. You’re watching a player, and you get into that rhythm. You’re like, ‘I know that guy. I like that guy.’ You know.”

Kline gets a rundown of prospects from Jimmy Gonzales during the ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C, Gonzales is one of the Nationals' cross-checkers -- a scout who goes anywhere, anytime, to check out players recommended by area scouts. "I got to go home so I can get some new clothes," Gonzales said before sharing his notes on players he'd scouted before Kline's arrival.

He looked around Hoover Met, dotted with scouts.

“We’re all locked in,” he said. “We all know who we want. We all know who we like.”

Baca scouted Reed in high school, three years earlier. “A kid I’ve always been drawn to,” he said. Scouts begin building their books on the next year’s draft class the summer before, when high school kids appear in massive “showcases” and college kids spend time in elite wood-bat leagues. In February, the scouts hit the road, five or six or seven games in a week, Miami one day, Oklahoma City the next.

The college conference tournaments in late May are smorgasbords, so many players in just one place. It’s why Kline and Baca got back to their hotel at midnight on a Tuesday after a full day of games and were on site for Vanderbilt and LSU on Wednesday morning, then Arkansas and Ole Miss just after noon, then Kentucky and Florida with Mississippi St. and South Carolina still to come under the lights.

“You have to love it,” Baca said. “You have to have a passion for it.”

Baca and Kline have worked together since 2001, when Rizzo was the scouting director in Arizona and hired Baca away from the Montreal Expos. Baca’s title is “national supervisor,” but he is what’s known in the industry as a “cross-checker” — a scout who could go anywhere at any time, following recommendations from area scouts about players he needs to see. He filters information to Kline, and by this point in their lives, they’re “like brothers,” Kline said, or even an old married couple.

“He’ll say, ‘Why are you in such a bad mood today?’ ” Kline said. “And I’ll just say, ‘It’s not you. It’s me.’ ”

So they argue, talking four or six or eight times a day by phone. Baca and Kline are unafraid to share their opinions on players with each other, with the Nationals’ other cross-checkers — Jeff Zona, Fred Costello and Jimmy Gonzales — and with Rizzo. That’s what they’re paid to do.

“The player will tell you what he is,” Kline said. “They always do.”

When Reed stepped into the box for his second at-bat, Kline needed to complete his opinion of him. What did it mean that he swung through a high fastball for his second straight strikeout? What did it mean in the fifth, when Reed drove the first pitch he saw high off the wall in right-center, a double that would have been a homer in almost any other park?