The James Wood Experience has an auditory component. For one thing, the brilliant 21-year-old outfielder from Washington hits baseballs really hard. Every time a baseball is hit really hard, a loud sound is produced. I realize that what I’m about to say is going to be speculative, or even mystical, and possibly offensive to the concept of science, but: there are some baseball players who hit the ball really hard. Even when they haven’t necessarily hit the ball fast or far. Most of these players are very big themselves. Wood’s bat makes a distinct, crisp, ringing sound poke There’s sound from the other side on grounders and foul balls and liners, too. poke becomes longer and deeper Thwack When he really connects, he’s melodic and even cryptic, a disturbing sound that registers in an irrational part of the human brain as a signal of terrible violence. The home run off the bat of Wood (or Shohei Ohtani, or Aaron Judge, or Giancarlo Stanton) reflects this more primal resonance; the information it conveys in an instant causes an instinctive, involuntary shrieking response.
For Washington Nationals fans, these are comforting sounds. It’s not often to find a man who can swing a bat and evoke physical sensations in a closed-eyed fan. Having such a man is a pleasant luxury; at 21, being such a man feels like a benevolent baseball angel kissing you on the forehead. Though Wood is still developing, his every plate appearance feels like an event. He’s often very selective at the plate, letting pitches go by with a detached, quiet alertness, as if his only reason for standing in the box is to satisfy scientific curiosities concerning the facility or ability of the opposing pitcher. He gives the sense that he views the events of a given moment as merely catalogued experience in service of an ongoing project, which is very well suited to this transitional period of Nationals baseball and Wood’s place in it.
I don’t mind it. For one thing, the inactivity means he walks a lot more: Wood’s on-base percentage has been nearly 100 points higher than his batting average since he was called up in July. As sad as it is, Wood ranks fourth on the Nationals in walks despite playing only 53 games. For another, his patience instills in onlookers the belief that every final swing of the bat derives from a deep understanding that a particular pitch is best suited to cause carnage. O Jesus, pay attention! It seems that when one of his big swings makes contact with the barrel, something will be destroyed, possibly the baseball, possibly the pitcher, or maybe someone in the stands. poke The sound told me that Wood’s bat had found the ball; more alarmingly, Thwack Tells me the ball will be eating in baseball hell tonight. In any case, I’m pretty well stoked.
There’s a quiet and very strange auditory quirk to the story of Wood’s rise to the majors. When Wood is in the on-deck circle, you can hear the sound of his footsteps. MASN viewers may have noticed this during broadcasts of home games over the summer. When Wood is on deck, and only when he’s on deck, the sound of feet on the ground can be heard above the general noise of a crowd of thousands.
It’s not like a Tyrannosaurus Rex Jurassic ParkWood is pretty big, though. Instead it has to do with where he likes to stand. Wood, when he’s next up, likes to hover in a particular spot in front of the backstop, several long steps away from the designated on-deck circle, from where he apparently enjoys a view of the pitcher and the ball in flight. The position chosen puts Wood directly in front of and a few inches from a low microphone, set up at ankle height along the edge of some advertising space, positioned to capture field-level sounds. If you’re watching a home broadcast of a Nats home game and Wood is on deck, you can’t fail to hear the little squeaking sound of his cleated feet in the dirt.
I’m not sure how long it took me to see this presented in anything other than MASN’s typically shoddy production quality, but Nets play-by-play man Bob Carpenter used his knowledge of this quirk to fill in some blanks in a recent broadcast:
once you’ve heard it – the little one Crunch Crunch When Wood re-sets his feet for a practice swing, there’s that slight crunch when he hits his bat against the toe of a shoe or ankle — you can’t mistake it anymore. And once you learn to hear it, it becomes a delightful little sensory feast to watch every couple of innings. C.J. Abrams will come to the plate (or Dylan Cruz, or sometimes even Alex Call, God help us) and a few seconds later the crunching will begin. Hey, our sweet boy is here, on time and exactly where he’s supposed to be.,
I find the soft crunching of Wood’s cleats very relaxing, possibly due to the soothing ASMR-like nature of the sound. Of course, there’s also the broader context: The Nationals have been in the wilderness for the past few seasons. The consequences of cheap ownership were already eroding the team’s foundation. Large MVP sized pieces The Nationals had won the 2019 World Series before. Team architect Mike Rizzo had previously won the World Series. inclined to decline during the 2021 regular season, past the point when it was possible to believe that a few years of patchwork fixes would keep the team fighting for contention. The Soto trade, in August 2022There was a method of team-building that was the equivalent of detonating explosives that eventually bring down the shell of a burned-out building. If it weren’t driven by unrelenting pessimism, you might admire the Soto Gambit: selling an all-time hitter when he was 23 years old, on the insane premise that doing so would finally secure a brighter future.
Wood arrived in Washington to make up for the loss of perhaps the best hitter who would ever wear a Nationals uniform. It’s hard to know if that awareness makes the leap from the intellectual to the physical in the experience of hearing Wood knock dirt off his spikes, but Wood is certainly the answer to this problem. Why After Juan Soto left. Whether the answer will ultimately be satisfactory will be known in the years to come, but it is already a relief that it is no longer completely mysterious. Here is the figure whose performance will help us understand a move that felt like a betrayal and was so useless.
There is no guarantee that whatever the team gets in a now-or-later, star-for-prospect trade will ever work out. Certainly there is no reason beyond insanity to expect any baseball prospect to become a star. There is even less reason to believe that any team willing to sell 26-year-old Bryce Harper for a low price and trade 23-year-old Juan Soto for a high price will ever allow itself to keep a player of his level. The Nationals owners Lerners have already twice declared in perfectly clear language of dollars and cents that they are not willing to hire any of baseball’s best players, not beyond the point when those players’ earnings are not capped by artificial salary mechanisms.
Still! I challenge you to watch some of the Nationals’ best goobers – let alone the Nationals’ best goobers in several years – and not think of James Wood’s plate appearance as a wave of order and calm. Wood’s moving around loudly while waiting his turn at the plate enhances the experience by a few minutes, which is a nice perk for television viewers: a glimpse of a moment of Nationals relevance that could be decisively punctuated by luck ThwackThey should call up all their best players to do this. Crews, who made his debut just a week ago and has about seven bazillion extra-base hits so far, should bend over completely and whisper directly into the microphone “I’m right here, guys.” That’s telling me things are going to get better soon: I’m listening.