James Wood, 22-year-old outfielder for the Washington Nationals, is mighty big and mighty strong. I think we've been very clear on this matter. Washington's offense, to date, isn't much—they rank eighth worst in the majors both by Statcast's Weighted On-base Average and by Baseball Reference's OPS+—but you cannot blame this on Wood, who is ranked third in the National League in home runs (7) and is 10th in runs batted in, and whose OPS Wednesday morning is a robust .902. Tuesday night Wood batted leadoff in the opening game of a series against the Baltimore Orioles, and had three hits, two doubles, and scored a pair of runs, and the Nationals won for the third time in four games.
Another area where our record here at Defector is unimpeachable: We have always been very up front about the fact that Wood, when he hits the ball, tends to hit the dick off of it. His average exit velocity this season is 94 miles per hour, per Statcast, in baseball's sixth percentile and better than such so-called strongmen as Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bryce Harper, Elly De La Cruz, and Juan Soto. Tuesday's performance, though dingerless, was a showcase of power: The three balls that Wood put in play averaged 108.3 miles per hour off his bat. The 109-mph double he pounded off the wall in the fifth inning only failed to reach the stands due to its screaming 21-degree launch angle. His second-inning single was hit at 107.6 miles per hour and stayed on the infield, but ate up Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson, allowing Wood to beat the throw to first. Oh right, Wood is also fast as hell, ranking in baseball's 77th percentile by sprint speed.
What type of batter is James Wood? Well, he's a huge lefty with a selective approach at the plate and titanic power. That description could fit Adam Dunn, or Joey Gallo, hulking pull-hitting sluggers, the types of batters who inspired the invention of the defensive shift. Look at this chart, which shows all of Wood's base hits prior to Tuesday's game, and you will see what looks like a standard spray pattern from the bat of a lefty power hitter.
Ah ha! Fooled your ass! Now you must work as my butler in the afterlife! What I did was, I took Wood's spray chart and I used advanced technology to reverse it horizontally. Below you will find Wood's actual spray chart, plus three dots that I added myself to show his hits from Tuesday. Compare it to the reversed one above, consider that Wood is, again, a lefty, and spend some time considering how much weirder and less believable the real chart is than the faked one.
Thomas Harrigan has a fun blog on the MLB website about Wood socking mighty dingers all over the place despite having a pretty high groundball rate overall. Here's something wild: 11 of the 19 balls that Wood has hit in the air this season (after Tuesday) have been "barreled," the highest percentage so far of any hitter in the league. Neat! But get this: Wood has also not yet pulled a single ball in the air this regular season, making him one of just two qualified batters in the majors for whom that box remains unchecked. Sit for a minute with that absolutely insane piece of information.
It's come up in Nationals broadcasts a couple of times, that Wood's swing is timed up to smoke fastballs into left-center. Nothing thus far in his short baseball career has ever convinced him to move him off of this approach, and it allows him to take the same swing at every pitch; in those instances when he takes this same mighty left-center rip at an off-speed or breaking pitch, his bat meets it in front of the plate and the ball goes not to left-center but to right-center, as in the case of the towering dinger he smoked off of Dodgers reliever Justin Wrobleski, on a 79-mph curveball. Those kinds of bombs have a more familiar, somewhat more satisfying look and shape, finishing in the classic lefty pose with the hitter watching the ball sail out of the left side of the television screen. The typical Wood blast doesn't necessarily register as a sockdolager immediately; it's only by watching his first 100 or so major-league games that I have learned to stand up any time he hits the ball in the air the other way.
He hit one against the Marlins on April 11 that is one of the crazier dingers I've seen (the last clip on this little highlight reel); it happened so fast and at such an improbable combination of angles that it took me a solid minute to understand what had happened:
That's not the deepest part of Marlins Park, but Marlins Park is huge, and is especially brutal for lefty hitters. This ball left Wood's bat at 111 miles per hour and gained a maximum altitude of just 60 feet. Perhaps the secret for lefty sluggers is to simply turn around an inside sinker and smoke it the other way, on a murderously low trajectory, so that it screams over the wall with enough pace to penetrate the side of an M1 Abrams. Kevin Frandsen, on the Nationals television broadcast, was reduced to giggles. The Miami home broadcast was stunned by what they'd seen. "Good lord," said play-by-play announcer Kyle Sielaff, as the ball carried over the wall in left-center. "How many other guys in baseball are doing that?"
I have the answer: No one else in baseball is doing precisely what James Wood is doing. Other guys are doing their own things, and doing great. James Wood is off in his own peculiar category.
