Book Excerpt: Smart, Wrong, And Lucky: The Origin Stories of Baseball’s Unexpected Stars

Plus ICYMI, Media Savvy and Baseball Photos of the Week.

Feb 14, 2024

Pitchers and catchers have reported to Camelback Ranch, Shohei Ohtani is homering off batting practice pitchers and all is right with the world. I’m in such a chipper mood that I thought I’d share with you a work of great interest. Number 24 in our book excerpt series is Smart, Wrong, and Lucky: The Origin Stories of Baseball's Unexpected Stars, by Jonathan Mayo (Triumph Books, July 11, 2023, Hardcover $21.10, Kindle $11.99).

The blurb at Amazon describes Mr. Mayo’s volume this way:

“In the plainest of terms, baseball scouts are tasked with seeing the future—a distant future, at that. Baseball’s long developmental arc leaves room for plenty of twists and turns on the way to The Show. Some prospects shoot like arrows toward their projected potential, while others fizzle out or chart an unexpected course.

“Joey Votto was a lightly scouted high schooler out of Ontario, Canada. Charlie Blackmon was once coveted for his left arm more than his offensive potential. Mookie Betts “lost interest in the draft” as he went unselected round after round. Jacob deGrom refused to relinquish his role as a shortstop. Lorenzo Cain never even put on a baseball glove until high school—and then wore it on the wrong hand.

“Smart, Wrong, and Lucky explores how first impressions measure up to their aftermaths: the draft, years of progression, and for a talented few, major league success. MLB.com writer Jonathan Mayo profiles a diverse range of modern stars and looks at them through the eyes of those who noticed them first as prospects.

“Featuring exclusive interviews with scouts, players, coaches, and more, this fascinating collection of origin stories is an ode to baseball’s endless possibilities.”

I have chosen a 12-page section of a long chapter about Mookie Betts to excerpt. The other players featured in the book are Joey Votto, Shane Bieber, Jacob deGrom, Charlie Blackmon, Ian Kinsler, Lorenzo Cain and Albert Pujols, in that order.

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Chapter 4 (partial): Mookie Betts

The 2011 Draft is likely going to go down as one of the greatest of all time since the draft was instituted in 1965. It’s a bit too early to tell for sure, since so many from that class are in the primes of their careers as of this writing. Whether it lives up to 1985, generally considered to be the standard bearer, we’ll have to wait and see, but it belongs in the conversation.

The very top of the draft was very, very good and has lived up to that billing. The college crop that year produced No. 1 overall pick Gerrit Cole, No. 6 pick Anthony Rendon and No. 11 overall George Springer, among others, who have collected multiple All-Star selections and other accolades, all of whom who had WARs over 30 through the 2022 season.

The high school side is equally impressive. This is the class, after all, that sent Francisco Lindor and Javier Baez on their way, both top 10 picks. The late Jose Fernandez went in the middle of the round and Trevor Story has exceeded expectations as a supplemental first-round pick.

But the best player from this extraordinary class was not a first rounder. He went in Round 5. In 2011, my employer, MLB. com, wasn’t doing draft rankings yet. Baseball America was the most trusted source at the time, and the leader in career WAR from this class wasn’t in their Top 200 that year. Perfect Game, a leader in elite-level high school events and showcases, had him at No. 304 nationally. He wasn’t even the best player in Tennessee, according to PG. He came in at No. 4.

Mookie Betts was a raw high schooler from Nashville, Tennessee, who was undersized at 5′10″, 165 pounds. Most teams missed him completely. He thought he might go in the second round and when that didn’t happen, he “lost interest in the draft at that point.”

Luckily for him and MLB, the Boston Red Sox did not. Just how did a small, skinny high schooler from an Overton High School, a public school program that had produced a couple of big leaguers, but none since the 1983 Draft, turn into the best player in the class after going in the fifth round? It’s a combination of good old-fashioned scouting and some new-fangled approaches the Red Sox were using at the time.

Betts was born as Markus Lynn Betts and no, it was not by design that his initials were MLB. He was named after his father, but a combination of his mother wanting to pay homage to her sister Cookie and the family being fans of the Atlanta Hawks and their point guard at the time, Mookie Blalock, led to them hanging the moniker on him at a very early age. (This must have come as a huge relief to Red Sox fans when he arrived in Boston, who had to be apoplectic about welcoming in a player potentially named after 1986 World Series nemesis Mookie Wilson.)

The fact that Betts was playing at Overton at all might have been seen as something somewhat surprising. More often than not, the young premium athletes in Nashville get snatched up by the big private schools like Montgomery Bell Academy or Brentwood Academy. Oh, they tried, making offers to the family to have him play multiple sports at their schools.

Longtime Overton coach Mike Morrison recognized immediately that Betts had tremendous athleticism and did what he could to keep Betts’ ability on the down low once he saw him playing for a local feeder program for the high school.

“There was no doubt how good of a baseball player he was,” Morrison said, according to Mainstreetpreps. “I tried to keep that quiet. I didn’t want for him to show up anywhere else, and we’re sure appreciative that he came to Overton.”

Morrison was aided by the fact that Betts’ parents were believers in public education and he didn’t suit up for those academies.

“My parents were the main reasons why I ended up coming to Overton,” Betts said (once, again, from Mainstreetpreps). “They just didn’t want to pay for [private] school and [thought] I could get my education at a public school and be very successful.”

They weren’t wrong, though anyone who said it was a slam dunk (something the sub six-foot Betts can do, by the way) back then is practicing some revisionist history. Yes, Betts was a very talented athlete, one who likely could have entertained offers to play college basketball and has gone on to bowl perfect games in high-level competitions. But he was small, not particularly strong, and not too many scouts thought it was going to work at the next level.

Red Sox area scout Danny Watkins was then in the minority. Watkins is a baseball lifer, one who played at Georgia Tech in the early 1980s and started coaching right after his college career was over, first as a volunteer assistant at Texas Christian University in 1983. After three years at Texas Tech (1984–86), he started the baseball program at Vernon Junior College in Texas and ran it for a decade. He spent three years as San Jacinto Junior College’s pitching coach, two as a scout for the Houston Astros, made two more college coaching stops before finding what looks like his forever home with the Red Sox in October 2004 and he’s been an area scout in the south with Boston since then.

It’s an interesting, though not unusual path, going from coaching to scouting. Not only does Watkins look back at his time in the college ranks warmly, but he also thinks it’s made him a better scout.

“We’re always projecting, we’re trying to figure out what a guy can be in three, four, five years and kind of understanding what it takes to make some of the adjustments needed,” Watkins said. “Some adjustments are not going to be able to be made. It helped me understand the psyche of successful players, the players that came into your program, and then were successful, there were a lot of similarities between those guys. They were very driven, hardworking, they were responsible, usually the guys that performed and excelled in the classroom were the guys that were going to push themselves on the baseball field as well. So it was all those personality traits that I really enjoy seeing in some of the kids that I scout.”

The first time Watkins laid eyes on Betts was the summer before his senior year of high school. File this under the “no rest for the weary” banner, but area scouts are typically out looking at the next year’s talent almost immediately after the previous draft ends. It was shortly after the end of the 2010 Draft that Watkins headed to the annual Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association’s showcase for rising seniors, held at Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro, about 35 miles southeast of Nashville.

It was a must-attend event for those who had Tennessee in their areas, with players from all over the state convening, getting split into teams, going through a workout and playing games against each other. It was Tennessee one-stop shopping for area scouts who were building follow lists—ranking players for the following year’s draft class—for the next spring.

Sometimes players jump out at scouts immediately because of their physicality, how they fill out a uniform. Scouts will say “this is what they look like” or they “look the part.” Betts was not one of those players in the summer of 2010.

Get used to hearing words like physicality and strength in this chapter. Because that’s the number one thing that kept Betts from generating much prospect buzz. When he arrived at this showcase, his official weight might have been “soaking wet holding a brick.” He’s listed as 5'9", so this wasn’t the kind of specimen that has an area scout calling up his bosses to rave.

But Watkins saw something in Betts right from the get-go. It wasn’t how he looked, it wasn’t raw power at the plate, it wasn’t any one tool that screamed. It was more that everything he did was just so easy.

“The one thing that I noticed about Mook was number one, he was extremely comfortable on the field,” Watkins said. “He could do just about anything without very much effort. I kind of got drawn to him, just watching how comfortable he was on the field. And he made one particular play early on in the session that kind of caught my eye and from there, I just kind of zeroed in on him a little bit more clearly.”

Watkins can still describe the play vividly, as if it happened last week. Betts was at shortstop, went behind the bag, gloved the groundball, and then flipped it behind his back for a perfect toss to second base.

“He wasn’t as physical as a lot of the other players there,” Watkins said. “But he had that quality about him that just made me believe that this guy was someone we were going to be able to project on.”

Betts had other opportunities in that summer of 2010 to impress scouts, and not just ones in Tennessee. The East Coast Professional Showcase is an event, run by major league scouts, that has taken place annually since 1996, bringing in around 150 players from across the Eastern United States each summer. In 2010, Betts was there. So was Watkins, along with area scouts, cross checkers, and scouting directors. All 30 teams have eyes and ears at East Coast Pro every year. For Watkins, it was an opportunity add to his Mookie file.

One of Betts’ early strengths was his ability to move around the diamond seamlessly. At East Coast Pro, he played shortstop, second base, and center field, a precursor to what has transpired in his professional career, getting drafted as a shortstop, playing mostly second base early on, then moving to the outfield without a hitch. But Watkins wasn’t a rookie. He knew that writing a report about Betts’ positional flexibility, or that he would be best suited for the right side of second base, wouldn’t get the higher-ups that excited.

“I just thought that in order for me to really get my message across that I felt like this was going to be a major league player, I evaluated him as a shortstop and turned him in as a shortstop, as much as there was some doubt the arm strength wasn’t quite what you see today, the physicality was not there,” he recalled. “But for me to turn in a high school second baseman? That would have taken a lot more convincing. So it was easier for me to keep him at shortstop and dream a little bit than it would have been to just pigeonhole him at second base. That would have been a much tougher sell.”

This is more than a little sleight-of-hand a scout can employ to make sure a prospect he likes gets noticed. Did Danny Watkins believe Mookie Betts was 100 percent, no doubt about it, a long-term shortstop? No, of course not. But by turning in reports on Betts at the premium position of shortstop, it was him putting his own credentials as a scout on the line, as if to say, “This is a kid we need to seriously take a look at.”

“It speaks to the scout’s conviction on the total player, is what it does,” Watkins said of writing a player up at one position over another, like he did with Betts. “If I can keep this guy as a shortstop in my report, make a reasonable case for that, then it speaks to the conviction that I have. You have to understand the people listening to my presentation, they want to know that I firmly believe that this guy is a major leaguer, and for me to have put him as a second baseman probably would have indicated to them less than stellar conviction.”

Watkins wasn’t the only one who noticed some good things about Betts that summer, of course, he just led the field headed into the turn. Perfect Game’s David Rawnsley, who often scouted summer showcase events outside of his own organization’s to get a feel for players in a given class, had these notes on the Tennessee prepster:

Plays way faster than 60 speed (6.75), impact guy on the bases, always on base, steals, takes extra base. Free swinger, fast bat, slashes and runs, contact guy, 4.19. played both OF and IF, looked most comfortable at 2B, good footwork, accurate throws, playable arm strength, quick release.

There were other teams who turned in favorable reports and it would turn out that the San Diego Padres were probably the biggest competition, but we’ll get to that in a bit. First, Mookie had to get through his other athletic endeavors before getting to the spring baseball season, his senior year in 2011.

Betts was a three-sport standout at Overton, but it wasn’t the customary trifecta—football, basketball, baseball—we usually hear about. Yes, basketball and obviously baseball, were on his high school résumé, and the third sport may not surprise you if you’ve seen his exploits on the professional tour: bowling.

This wasn’t just a PE class in high school, or a thing he did for fun on weekends with friends. This is a guy who bowled a perfect game in the World Series of Bowling, a rare time when a hitter wants 12 straight strikes recorded. Back at Overton, he earned Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association (TSSAA) State Bowler of the Year honors in 2010. If this guy wanted to earn a living on the lanes, he could. There hasn’t been too much work done on how bowling skills translate to an athlete’s work on the diamond, but rest assured teams at least made note of how much Betts liked to compete and excel in anything he did.

Lest you think scouts rest up and take it easy in the winter months, Watkins, for one, made sure to go watch Betts on the basketball court, getting extra information on the athleticism and the competitiveness of the prospect. Betts was a very good basketball player, one who could have played the game collegiately had he desired, though it likely would have been at a smaller program than the University of Tennessee, where he was committed to play baseball.

Watkins also would just go and watch Betts work out, take batting practice, field grounders, as things started to move toward the 2011 season. He recalls going to see Betts play five times, over 30 competitive at-bats, over the course of that spring. His initial reports placed Betts in the fifth round, but that evolved the more he saw Betts in action.

“By the end, I had him in the third round. And so that helium that he had, in my opinion, probably factored in a little bit as well,” Watkins said about Betts’ stock within the Red Sox organization, using a draft term—helium—which means his value was rising.

What also helped was that Watkins had established himself as a very good scout. The 2011 Draft would be his seventh with the organization and he had proven his evaluations were worth paying attention to.

“I think it speaks to the trust and trust is developed in an area scout over time,” Watkins said. “And by that point in my Red Sox career, I guess I had developed a certain level of trust to where my initial report would generate some interest on the other side. The reader of the report would be able to look at the things I was saying, and then think to themselves, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s make sure we get some more eyes on this player.’ And we started to get some guys come in, some cross checkers and special assistant guys, and to a man, they pretty much agreed with my feelings. And that helped me feel even more conviction that I was on the right path.”

One of those people “on the other side” who read Watkins’ reports was Tom Allison. He was brand new to the organization, having started on November 1, 2010. But he was far from a scouting novice. He had spent the previous four years as the scouting director of the Arizona Diamondbacks, overseeing a department that brought in players like Paul Goldschmidt, A.J. Pollock, and Wade Miley, among a host of other big leaguers. As is often the case in the industry, new management came in and wanted to bring in their own people, so Allison was dismissed from the D-backs, but was able to land on his feet as a Midwest regional crosschecker with the Red Sox. It was a continuation of a scouting career that began back in 1995, right after his playing days in the minor leagues ended, a long résumé he’s still adding to.

Allison had spent seven seasons in a similar post with the Brewers, so he knew the drill. Like any scout coming in as a new guy in a supervisory position, he had to do two main things when he got started in the fall of 2010: Read through all the follow reports from the area scouts in his region and get to know the area scouts who wrote them.

“I remember reaching out, talking to Danny to ask, ‘Hey, going into the year, who are your better feel guys that you’re really excited about?’” said Allison, who joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as a special assignment scout in 2021. “And Mookie’s name kept coming up.”

So Alison really dove into the follow reports and the video the Red Sox had on Betts. His research taught him several things, including loving the fact that his initials were MLB. A player with any kind of major league bloodlines is always going to draw some attention, and Allison learned Betts’ uncle is Terry Shumpert, who spent parts of 14 seasons in the big leagues. Allison put another check by his name when he read about how much Betts liked to talk hitting.

“This guy loves to talk about approach and what he was trying to do at the plate, despite what his other physical characteristics were,” Allison recalled.

One of a veteran scout’s biggest assets might be the relationships they form over the years in the game, ones that can become valuable resources. Case in point: Years ago, Allison had played against Tim Dulin. Dulin now runs one of the most elite travel teams in the country, the Dulin Dodgers. And, you guessed it, Mookie Betts played for the Dulin Dodgers in the summer of 2010 and again in 2011. That turned out to be just another positive recommendation for Allison to chew on.

Tim Dulin had started his elite travel ball program about 10 years earlier and the Dulin Dodgers already had a reputation for being one of the better programs in the country. Here is another example of previous relationships in baseball leading to something beneficial. One of Doolin’s roommates when he played at the University of Memphis was Mike Morrison, who, as luck would have it, was the Overton high school baseball coach where Mookie Betts played.

“He had called me about Mookie and said, ‘Hey, I got this special kid, and you need to meet him,’” Dulin recalled. “He and his dad were in Memphis during the winter playing in a high school basketball tournament… and I met with them. I was very impressed with [him] and his dad. And then then that summer, he played with me.

“You see guys come through, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some really good players come through and his ability at that age to slow the game down and play with energy [stood out]. He wasn’t very big back then. Heck, he’s not big now. I had some infielders that were really, really good. And he was, at the time, a shortstop, and we were short in the outfield. And I said, ‘Hey, can you play center field?’ He was like, ‘Yeah,’ and he had never played it before. But he went out there and just did his thing. I knew at that point in time that as many players as you see, and you play as long as I did, he had that ‘it’ factor.”

A few years later, Dulin was at the SEC tournament and talking to Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington, who was part of the front office as an assistant GM when Betts was drafted. As Dulin tells it, Cherington asked him whether Betts ever played the outfield for him. Dulin’s response, of course, was, “Why, in fact he has,” and proceeded to tell him the above story. Fast forward a couple of weeks and the Red Sox promoted Betts from Double-A Portland to Triple-A Pawtucket. And not long after that promotion, Betts started playing center field because that was more likely where there would be an opening in Boston, given the presence of Dustin Pedroia. Coincidence? Clearly, Dulin doesn’t think so.

At this point, Allison already had put Betts on his must-see list. But there was one more piece of information that made him even more excited for spring trips to Tennessee. More often than not, initial follow lists are generated by one area scout only. That might be different if it’s an elite-level prospect who plays at a variety of high-end showcase events over the summer. Betts wasn’t quite at that level, but remember he did go to the East Coast Pro Showcase, where not only was he seen by all 30 teams, he was also seen by more than one Red Sox scout.

Tim Hyers was the Red Sox area scout in Georgia back then, before he went on to become the big league hitting coach. He was also at ECPS, so when Allison was creating a Mookie Betts file, he had strong evaluations not only from Watkins, but from Hyers as well. And that meant a lot to Allison.

“It speaks volumes as you’re trying to understand new scouts, how they look at players, what they talk about, and when you kind of hear it in their voice, the inflection,” Allison said. “They just wanted to continue to talk about some of the things that certain player, i.e., Mookie, did over the course of spending so much time with them. I personally put a heavy value on that. And so I was pretty excited to get to see him firsthand.”

About the author:

Jonathan Mayo has been a writer for MLB.com since 1999, focusing on the MLB Draft and minor league prospects since 2003. This is his second book, having authored Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher in 2008. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sara, and has two children, Ziv and Elena.

ICYMI:

First and foremost, Clayton Kershaw is back in the fold after signing a two-year contract with the Boys in Blue.

In a considerably smaller move, the Dodgers have signed former DBacks outfielder Chris Owings to a minor-league deal with an invitation to Spring Training.

Former Dodgers catcher Russell Martin has been elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

Performance enhancing drug cheat, proud possessor of a .079 batting average in 101 at bats in 32 postseason games as a Dodger and resident butterfingers, Yasmani Grandal, has signed a one-year, $2.5 million deal to (try to) catch for the Pirates. No word on whether he dropped the pen once or twice before signing his name.

Two-time Cleveland Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber has retired after 13 seasons. The lifetime statistics are as follows: 116-77 won/loss, 3.44 ERA, 3.23 FIP, 1.129WHIP, 8 SHO and 1725 strikeouts in 1641 2/3 innings. I had hopes of him becoming a Dodger for a period of time, and as recently as 2023.

Former Mets general manager Billy Eppler has been suspended for the 2024 season for fabricating player injuries. What followed was a rather unfortunate chorus of scorn from the national baseball media. And while claiming fake injures in order to make active roster moves is better than hiding injuries to take advantage of a team in a trade, as was the case when Padres GM A.J. Preller was suspended in 2016, they’re both bad. Here’s an idea: don’t cheat.

And sadly, longtime host of NPR’s “Morning Edition, Bob Edwards, has passed away at the age of 76. I remember him fondly, and in particular for a recurring segment with Brooklyn Dodgers play-by-play man Red Barber. You can listen to 11 episodes of “Fridays with Red” here. And buy Edwards’ book, “Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship” here.

Media Savvy:

The word “care” is mentioned 13 times in this 840-word Dylan Hernandez story about Betts at the Los Angeles Times. But look, it’s not that we don’t care that Betts cares about baseball. It’s just that we’d care to see more evidence of it. And we care about his subpar performance in the postseason. And we don’t care all that much about bowling. And we didn’t care for Betts’ tone-deaf support of Trevor Bauer in his first appearance as a Fox commentator at the 2023 World Series. But I digress.

Tim Britton, Grant Brisbee and Aaron Gleeman of the Athletic chime in with their offseason grades, asking and answering the question about which teams passed and failed. The listing is alphabetical, and if isn’t completely obvious, the Dodgers earned an A.

Similarly, here is the Athletic’s rankings of baseball’s farm systems, by Keith Law. L.A. ranks third, behind the Orioles and Brewers. The Giants rank 23rd and the Angels 29th, ahead of only the A’s.

Also at the Athletic is an Evan Drellich story detailing commissioner Rob Manfred’s February 9 press conference at Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Topics include but are not limited to expansion, media rights, the sale of the O’s and baseball at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Also at the Athletic is an excerpt from Andy McCullough’s upcoming book, “The Last Of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness.” There’s a great story about how the Royals drafting of Dodgers-spurner Luke Hochevar led to Kershaw falling to the Dodgers in the 2006 draft. Had Kersh been off the board, the club was going to select Bryan Morris. I’ve received my copy of “The Last Of His Kind” and will have an excerpt of a different section of the book when it is published in early May.

The Royals are poised to announce plans for a new ballpark. Read the story, by interestingly, a writer named Sam McDowell, at the Kansas City Star.

And finally, here is “What Sports Fans Need to Know About a New Streaming Service: The joint venture announced by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery will offer a lot, but it may not be enough on its own for serious fans,” by Kevin Draper at the New York Times.