Chad Finn's top 50 Red Sox prospects of the last 50 years

This might be unfair and I've honestly only skimmed the article so far, but... I can't help shake the feeling that the entire motivation for these rankings was to compare Xander to the two players ranked just behind him.

A terrific series. It's very hard to balance contemporary hype with our current understanding of player evaluation; when you factor in defensive value, for instance, there's no question that Xander and Dewey should rank ahead of Jim Ed. But I think Finn did as good a job as you might expect, and the research is tremendous. (It's too bad he didn't have access to the BA Top 10 writeups that have never been online; I'm pretty sure I have them going back to '86 in my office.)

I'm guessing that there aren't too many folks on this board who have been actively following Sox prospects since before the draft era and could name-drop folks like Gage Naudain (.280 / .416 / .527 for Pocatello in the Class C Pioneer League in 1962), so I remembered all of it. (Yeah, even as an 8-year old I was more fascinated by the "Promising Newcomers" section in the back of the annual Red Sox Yearbook than by the section on big-leaguers. Everyone is hard-wired to dream good things about the future, to some extent, and it's a particular weakness of mine.)

The one major quibble I have is the omission of Greg Blosser, a 16th overall pick in the draft out of HS who the next year hit .282 / .361 / .459 at age 19 in high-A, in a league that hit .253 / .330 / .358. That's serious prospect helium.