James Wood has shown the baseball world how dominant he can be. He catapulted to the top of the leaderboards early this season, earned his second All-Star selection and finished the year with 30 home runs, 30 doubles and 21 stolen bases -- in spite of being sidelined for nearly an entire month.
This offseason, Wood is drilling down into those big numbers.
“It’s the little things day to day, game to game, not giving away at-bats, not giving away pitches,” Wood said at the end of the season. “I feel like just being able to hone in on that over 162 games makes a pretty big difference.”
Wood appeared in 135 games in his second full Major League season. He missed 27 contests from Aug. 4 to Sept. 1 because of a left oblique strain.
Wood slashed .265/.388/.503 with a .891 OPS and 102 walks in his age-23 season. He led all players in average exit velocity (95.4 mph) and hard-hit percentage. Among the entire National League, he ranked second in runs, OPS and wOBA; third in walks, on-base percentage and wRC+; sixth in slugging percentage; and tied for ninth in homers.
But similar to 2025, there was a clear differential between his first- and second-half performances.
Wood mashed 28 home runs and recorded a .985 OPS and .575 slugging percentage in 97 games before the All-Star break. He only appeared in 17 games out of the break before he sustained the oblique strain. In that stretch from July 17 to Aug. 3, he went 13-for-68 with two home runs, a .620 OPS and a .324 slugging percentage.
When Wood returned from the IL for the final three-plus weeks of the season, he hit .263 with a .680 OPS in September.
“I don't know how much of that is him trying to get back quickly and maybe not being quite 100 percent versus how much of it is just fatigue or whatever it was last year,” manager Blake Butera said at the end of the season. “It’s something we're going to continue to talk through …
“I asked our hitting coaches to dive in to see if there's anything specifically that stands out to them -- whether it's he's taking more of these pitches or he's chasing more of this pitch. … When he's in the middle of the field, you're like, ‘All right, he's on.’ When he's pulling those ground balls foul or hitting them to first base, that's when you can kind of tell that he's not timed up right now or seeing it well, and I think that's what we saw for those two or three weeks there. But I'm happy that he's finishing on this note.”
This winter, Wood will focus just as much on preventing runs as he does scoring them. Wood, who played 93 games in right field and 19 games in left field, recorded a cumulative -6 Outs Above Average. This was an improvement from his -7 OAA last season, but not enough for Wood.
“Defensively, I feel like I've left a lot of runs on the table for the pitchers,” said Wood. “And I want to be able to help those guys out a lot more.”
Wood already became the second player in Nationals team history (2005-present) to hit 30 home runs in back-to-back seasons. He belted an inside-the-park grand slam and then smashed one out of the park, just six weeks apart. Wood was one of only five Major League players this season to tally 30 home runs and 20 stolen bases.
The list of accolades goes on and on.
Next season, the goal is for those achievements to extend from Game 1 to 162.
“At the end of the day,” said Butera, “we’ve got to get him to be really good, start to finish.”