James Wood is a pretty good leadoff hitter. Rookie Nationals manager Blake Butera, a disturbingly young fellow who looks like he should be one of the nine guys in this video, moved Wood to the top of Washington's lineup back in the spring, gradually swapping the places of Wood and former leadoff guy C.J. Abrams, who is now Washington's regular cleanup hitter. Wood is good at leadoff stuff: He leads the National League in walks and on-base percentage, and has successfully stolen 10 bags in 11 tries. Because he gets on base a lot, and because Abrams is thriving behind him, Wood leads the majors pretty comfortably in runs scored. The Nationals, in fact, lead all MLB teams in runs.
All you care about is dingers. Wah wah wah, show me the dingers, you are wailing, smacking your sippy cup onto your tray table and shooting milk everywhere. Dingers are only one part of the game! Fine, here's a dinger:
Simple dinger appreciators will see nothing particularly noteworthy in a lefty slugger wrapping a sockdolager around the foul pole in right field. Committed James Wood watchers (subtle observers; sophisticated; dashingly handsome) will tell you—in fact, are telling you, this very minute—that this dinger is a rare and precious delight. We had fun last season watching Wood's spray chart and noting how long into the season he went before pulling a single ball in the air. Of the 31 homers Wood clubbed in 2025, just six were pulled to right. Because of how Wood likes to swing the bat, and because he is so enormous, he has always tended to do most of his power hitting into the alley in left-center. It has gotten to the point where anytime Wood hits the ball in the air the other way, you should go ahead and stand up. The inside-the-park grand slam he hit on May 19, for instance, was a screaming opposite-field liner that bonked off the top of the wall in deep left, causing earthquake-like reverberations that incapacitated two Mets outfielders.
Wood still loves to murder a ball the other way. Already this season he's hit nine dingers in a little cluster out thataway, grouped the way golfers like to perform around a practice green. Nationals relievers, in the home bullpen just beyond the wall out there, know to keep a wary eye on the skies during Wood's plate appearances, lest they take a ball to the noggin at 114 miles per hour. But as the video suggests, Wood has shown a somewhat more adaptable approach in 2026, and has already clubbed five balls out to right. The one off Joey Cantillo up there was on a tragically misfired changeup. Wood similarly delivered into baseball hell off-speed stuff from Tanner Bibee and Janson Junk. And, for good measure, he has gone ahead and pulled a couple of fastballs into the seats, including one from Brandon Woodruff, a sinker that was off the plate inside.
It's not clear so far this season that Wood is doing anything different at the plate. He was a very good MLB hitter the moment he graduated from Triple-A, and this is his second full season in the majors, so naturally he will have fortified certain of his strengths. Pulling the ball in the air is an area of focus for many hitters, because for many hitters that is how they access what little power they possess in their puny bats. Wood swings the mightiest of lumber with outrageous, titanic power; pulling the ball has thus not been a major area of developmental concern for Washington's coaches. But Wood struggled down the back stretch of last season, after the Nationals cleared out Mike Rizzo and Davey Martinez, when everyone on their roster had the flat eyes and sagging shoulders of the animated dead. Wood's strike-outs spiked, his power waned, and it started to look like the opposite-field fireworks were related to his propensity for hitting the ball on the ground, both possibly a sign of too long a swing for Wood to reliably frame up and crush major-league pitching.
The signs this season tell a different, more encouraging story. For one thing, Wood has cut down his ground-ball rate from 49.7 percent in 2025 to 40.1 percent this season, or about the same rate as Shohei Ohtani, a decent Wood comp for having God-like slugging power. Wood's fly-ball and line-drive rates are at career highs, while his pop-up rate is at a career low. He is still striking out a lot, but not at the worrying, historic rate he posted in 2025. Hilariously, though he's posted a few big pull-side dingers for his 2026 highlight reel, Wood is otherwise the same guy, only more so: He has pulled in the air an ostentatiously low 10.9 percent of the balls he's put in play, while a whopping 31 percent of the balls he's put in play have been in the air the other way, up from about 20 percent over the first season-and-a-half of Wood's big-league career. He's getting better at hitting the ball in the air, he's just doing it in his own particular way. God love him.
I started off talking about Wood's qualities as a leadoff guy, but this blog is not about that. I had to get it in there before we started in on the dingers, the way that American families of the early 20th century would cram down stalks of celery before the meat and potatoes hit the table. The fact is, Wood has socked 15 dingers, tied for second in the National League. He has also clobbered 15 doubles, also tied for second; as you have probably guessed by now, Wood today leads the National League in OPS. Also, though he has batted leadoff in every one of Washington's games so far this season, he is presently tied for eighth in the league in runs batted in. Per Statcast, Wood is in baseball's 100th percentile in xwOBA, a nerd stat that in this case says that Wood is a being of pure light, that all things considered Wood has actually suffered from some amount of bad luck on balls in play this season. Look at this:
Also yesterday in Cleveland he had the most casual home-run-robbery you are likely to ever see, a benefit of being the size of an Ent:
Good baseball guy.
