90% of Prospect Success is Half Mental

I don't think a guy performing at a given level for 2.5 months (or in some of these cases, even less - or FAR less - than that) is a mistake at all, embarrassing or otherwise. Or whatever else is being posited here.

The answer is that a projected value, ceiling, or floor is looking at a period of, depending who you talk to, the guy's career or at least his years of team control. Sometimes guys exceed all projections, for sure. But like, David Hamilton has had 2 good weeks. Houck is finally doing this in his 4th MLB season. Plus there's the context of when a report is from, etc.

I don't want this to come off as defensive, I just think the underlying premise is nonsense, as is the "the Red Sox just identify special players!" or whatever it is conclusion. The Red Sox have also selected multiple felons, first round busts, guys who got 7-figure bonuses that scouts NPed in their first camp, etc. during my time with SoxProspects. It's a crapshoot and some teams are better at it. The Red Sox have generally done really well at it! Hence 4 rings, right?

Either that or something the Red Sox thought 20 years ago (that I can't quite grasp from the post) still holds perfectly true 20ish years later. But long story short, the idea that the Red Sox are the only team that scouts makeup, which is literally what's being described here, is kind of hilarious.

If there’s actual hard data to prove that Sox prospects in the top 100 fare better… can you provide it?

Pretty sure every single guy he mentioned is a guy who missed a year of development (2020), too.  That might be something, but if it is, it's going to be league wide.  Maybe those guys took a little longer to hit their stride, and there would be a legit reason as to why.  

On another note, every guy he named is also entering or in their prime years so there's that too.  What it isn't, is the Sox having some secret sauce.  

There are not two sides. It's called makeup and teams have always scouted it.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me suggest that the Sox may be more focused on makeup than the average team, or better at identifying it. I seem to remember reading several Globe articles over the last 10 years to that effect. It’s also true that the Sox have been at the forefront of selecting for certain soft skills (the reflex test, for example, which the Sox had invested in at the time, which famously pegged Betts as super-elite before the draft). I don’t know how much that particular test would help in selecting for pitchers, though I do remember Houck being touted as a plus-plus makeup guy shortly after he was drafted. Anyway, it’s a lot of piecemeal evidence, but I don’t have trouble believing that the Sox may be above-average at this part of scouting.

  The words in theory are doing a lot of work here, as the rest of this paragraph and the next offer no hesitation.

  You seem to be suggesting that any player can be taught to "excel" at catching fly balls, given enough hard work and practice and "reps."

  This seems unlikely to be true.  
 
  The more reasonable claim that most young players need to work far harder than most of us could imagine to make the most of their natural skills seems both true, and something that most teams would know.