The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Mayo’s new book “Smart, Wrong and Lucky: The Origin Stories of Baseball’s Future Stars,” which is available from Triumph Books. The excerpt details what Red Sox area scout Danny Watkins initially saw in Betts, who flew under the radar largely because of his size.

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.” Mookie 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 No. 1 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 he wasn’t the kind of specimen that has an area scout calling up his bosses to rave.

But Danny 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 ground ball 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 to 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 [he] 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,” Watkins 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 Watkins believe 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 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 High School, 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.