James Wood Has Towering Upside | Triple-A Best Tools
Aaron Judge and Oneil Cruz are 6-foot-7 sluggers who stand out for their power in major league Best Tools voting.
That extra-tall duo should have company in short order.
Nationals rookie James Wood also stands 6-foot-7 and also has game-changing power.
Wood spent half of this season with Triple-A Rochester before making his MLB debut on July 1. While he was in the International League, he captured managers’ attention.
Wood unanimously won Best Power Prospect and also claimed Most Exciting Player in a survey of league skippers for Best Tools.
Wood hit .353/.463/.595 with 10 home runs in 52 games for Rochester. His .242 isolated slugging was the best for a player 21 or younger at Triple-A this season.
He hit a ball as hard as 115.3 mph with Rochester. Just eight Triple-A hitters struck a ball harder this season. Five of the eight are Jhonkensy Noel, Junior Caminero, Rece Hinds, Agustin Ramirez and Owen Caissie, who like Wood are up-and-coming power hitters.
The Nationals challenged Wood to clean up his pitch selection and reduce his whiff rate this season. Mission accomplished on both counts.
Wood shrunk his in-zone miss rate from 23% last season to 15% this year. His chase rate remained static as he climbed from Double-A to Triple-A, but he declined to swing at pitchers’ pitches with greater frequency in 2024.
It all added up to a dramatically reduced strikeout rate of 18% at Triple-A this season, compared with nearly 34% at Double-A last year.
Wood has the type of ceiling to match his height, and he continues to make the Nationals’ Juan Soto trade with the Padres in August 2022 look like a franchise-maker.
When he reached Washington, Wood joined fellow young big leaguers CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore as bounty from the Soto trade.
