Why slide when you can just be 6-foot-6? Wood dares to ask

SAN FRANCISCO – At 6-foot-6, James Wood is an imposing presence.

And it took nearly every inch of that frame to score a run in one of the most consequential moments of the Nats’ thrilling come-from-behind 4-3 win over the Giants on Monday at Oracle Park.

In a scoreless game in the sixth inning, Wood rocketed a 114.3 mph single up the middle against San Francisco ace Logan Webb, the hardest contact of the game on either side.

Wood promptly stole second base to give the Nats their first runner in scoring position on the night, picking up a minor scrape on his lower lip from his headfirst slide when his helmet fell off and bounced back into his face.

“Yeah, I got smoked,” Wood said with a smile afterward of his helmet’s betrayal, as teammate (and one of the game’s heroes) CJ Abrams lit up with laughter a few lockers over.

Luis García Jr. then deposited Webb’s next offering into right field for a single. Wood charged around third base and headed for home in an effort to avoid the throw from right fielder Jung Hoo Lee.

But do you suppose Wood scored with a standard slide into the plate?

No, he did not.

Instead, Wood casually reached down and touched the plate with his left hand, avoiding Eric Haase’s tag on his adventurous trip back to the dugout.

“I was going in for the slide and then I saw Haase kind of run up the line, and I guess that was my attempt to try and slide and still touch the base,” Wood said.

Was that perhaps the most adventurous trip around the bases Wood can recall in his career?

“I was thinking that when I got in the dugout,” he said. “I was like, ‘That was an interesting trip.’”

Abrams and the rest of Wood's teammates clearly thought so, too, and they let him hear it when he got back to the Nats’ dugout.

“I caught a lot of flak, yeah.”

Nationals manager Blake Butera appreciated Wood’s energy there in the sixth, as it turned out to be a pretty key sequence in the game.

“The ability for him to get on there and steal second at his size, and score from second there … I think he was in between sliding and standing up, so he didn't mean to reach down to touch home and then slide after he got to home.

“But hey, that's one way to do it, and it counted as a run.”

Teammate ribbing aside, Wood’s journey was something only a 6-foot-6 athlete with that kind of wingspan can do -- a pretty valuable gift, indeed.