BURKE, Va. -- When Stephanie Miller saw the baby boy, her heart melted.

In an instant, all the pain and frustration Stephanie and her husband, Richard Green, had endured in their inability to conceive a child went away. Because there, on a VHS cassette sent along by an adoption agency, was footage of a 6-month-old child in need of a loving family.

“He looked precious,” Stephanie says now. “I instantly fell in love.”

The only problem? He was in Siberia.

And so it was that, after a few months of patience and paperwork, Stephanie and Richard made the long, long journey from Virginia to LaGuardia to Moscow to Tomsk to meet their son.

Oleg Sergevich Kornev, by then 9 months old, was shy at first. The boy sunk himself into the nurse presenting him to his adoptive parents. But when Stephanie and Richard returned the next day, he brightened up, wrapped his arms around his new mom and wouldn’t let go.

With that embrace, young Oleg was opened up to a new life, a new country, a new identity. It was in that moment that he essentially shed his name and his Siberian self and began the process of becoming a naturalized United States citizen.

And, as it turns out, one of the more incredible MLB Draft stories you’ve ever heard.

When the White Sox selected a 23-year-old named Lyle Miller-Green with the 499th overall pick in the Draft in the 17th round on Wednesday, the young man who was saved from a Russian “baby house” by two loving Americans was embraced yet again. Should Miller-Green, a 6-foot-6 right fielder from Austin Peay, seize this opportunity the way he has his upbringing in the U.S., this Siberian Sultan of Swat is going to be something special.

“If he ever makes it to the big leagues,” says Austin Peay coach Roland Fanning, “Walt Disney should take his story and make a movie out of it.”

Only five Russian-born players have played in the Major Leagues in the modern era, but only one -- a right-hander named Victor Cole -- debuted in the live ball era (since 1920) and was selected in the Draft. Cole, who briefly pitched for the Pirates in 1992, was born to an American father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, where his father was studying medicine. He moved to the United States when he was 4.

So for a full-blooded Russian to be selected in this process is unique. But save for the bottle of vodka his adoptive father brought back from Russia and gave to him as a gift to be opened in adulthood (he planned to crack its seal and do a shot from it to celebrate his Draft selection), Miller-Green displays no trace of his roots. He might answer to teammates who occasionally, affectionately call him by his Russian name as an inside joke, but he speaks with no accent and feels no pangs of patriotism for his birth country.

“I feel like I hit the lottery,” Miller-Green says. “I was brought here to the States and welcomed into a great family with great parents. I try not to take a day for granted, because what if I had stayed in Russia? I definitely wouldn’t be playing baseball, right?”

Miller-Green’s appreciation is intensified by the timing of his adoption. His parents came and got him in the summer of 2001, just a couple months before the 9/11 attacks shut down international travel. Had Stephanie and Richard not made the trip when they did, who knows what baby Oleg’s future might have held?

“There are a lot of what-ifs with my story,” Miller-Green says.

A year after adopting their son, Stephanie and Richard went back to Russia to adopt another child -- a girl they named Samantha. They never kept the adoptions a secret from their kids. Actually, the story of how he was brought over from his native land inspired a love of air travel and caused Miller-Green to give an amusing answer when, as a young child, one of his friends asked if he knew where babies are born.

“Delta Airlines,” he replied earnestly.

Even if his adoption had been kept secret, Miller-Green’s unusual size would have given him away eventually. He was 6-foot-2 by the eighth grade, already shooting past his 5-foot-11 adoptive father and 5-foot-5 adoptive mother. And that height originally had him cast as a pitcher. In fact, during his sophomore year of high school, he committed to Virginia Tech to be a pitcher only.

But Miller-Green’s birth story is unusual and so, too, is, his baseball story. A Virginia Tech coaching change during his junior year of high school forced Miller-Green to look elsewhere for scholarship money, and he wound up spending his freshman year at George Mason -- just a few miles from his Burke, Va., home -- as a two-way player in the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

Beginning to round into form as a hitter and looking to leave his comfort zone, Miller-Green transferred to play for junior college powerhouse Chipola (Fla.) in 2021. There, he attracted eyes at Oklahoma State and transferred again. But with the Cowboys’ roster crowded, he spent much of the 2022 season riding the bench.

Still, Fanning, who at the time was Oklahoma State’s director of player development, took a shine to Miller-Green.

“In a world where kids complain and gripe and cry about their playing time,” says Fanning, “this guy worked as hard as anyone to prepare. I watched it every day. I just always appreciated how good of a teammate he is when he wasn’t playing.”

So when Fanning landed the head coaching job at Austin Peay prior to the 2023 season, he asked Miller-Green to come with him. It was Miller-Green’s fifth school in five years, counting high school, but it quickly became home.

Though Miller-Green continued to pitch with the Governors, it’s his booming bat that put him on the professional radar. In his first season at Austin Peay, he started 58 games as a DH and led the team in batting average (.354), homers (16) and RBIs (51). He then contributed a .921 OPS for Chatham in his third summer in the Cape Cod League (where he won a Home Run Derby in 2022).

This past season, Miller-Green split his time between DH and right field and took his offensive performance to another level, setting Austin Peay and Atlantic Sun Conference single-season records for home runs (30) and runs scored (94) while batting .393 with a .900 slugging percentage and .533 on-base percentage. He drove in 94 runs and even tied for the team lead with 13 stolen bases.

Miller-Green became the first player in school history to be named on five different All-America teams, including first team honors from the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association and PerfectGame.com. He was not only the Atlantic Sun’s Player of the Year but also the conference’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

“When he walks in a room, he’s got everybody’s attention,” Fanning says. “When he takes batting practice, he’s got everyone’s attention. In meetings, when he speaks, he’s got everyone’s attention.”

As evidenced by an eye-catching image of Miller-Green towering over Fanning as the two slap hands at third base during the slugger’s home run trot, this intriguing power prospect is hard to miss. Yet he went undrafted a year ago -- a disappointing experience that only fueled him all the more. He returned to Austin Peay vowing to win a championship and led the team to its first conference title in more than a decade.

“He protects his joy with everything he’s got,” Fanning says. “It pours out of him. It oozes out of him. It bleeds out of him. And he pours his joy into other guys, as well.”

The joy comes from knowing this life in baseball and life in America was a gift that was given to him by his parents. And that’s what made it so devastating last September when Richard died suddenly of a heart attack at age 74, just five days after Lyle’s birthday.

But it’s a credit to how much Miller-Green is respected that, while he was home grieving the tragic loss, his teammates were all writing him letters of support and appreciation and love.

“As soon as I got back to campus, I was welcomed back to a pile of 35 letters,” he says. “That’s when I knew we’re gonna have a real team of guys that are going to be fighting for each other every day.”

It’s another letter that Miller-Green first read a couple years ago that puts his story in stark perspective. It is called a “letter of abandonment,” and it outlines how his birth mother put him up for adoption at four days old and how he came to be eligible for an international adoption.

“The Director of the Orphanage Matyotina Z.S. confirmed at the court hearing their agreement concerning adoption,” the letter reads, “and also proved that, during the entire period of the boy’s presence at the orphanage, nobody was interested or visited or wanted to adopt him.”

As this Draft outcome shows, the boy who became Lyle Miller-Green is wanted now.

“I'm just so proud of him,” Stephanie Miller says. “And I'm so happy for him, because I don't think that there's anything a mother wants more than to see their children live out their dreams. … He's such a positive young man, and he believes in himself, and I believe in him too. And I hope this dream can come true for him.”