James Wood will make his major-league debut Monday against the Mets, according to multiple sources.
If there's a prospect call-up to get excited about in a year when they've all gone so poorly, this is it. The forward-facing numbers are impressive enough -- in 51 games at Triple-A, Wood has hit .346 (64 for 185) with 10 homers and 10 steals, reaching base at a .458 clip with a 1.036 OPS -- but the enthusiasm runs much deeper. In fact, no one would look at you sideways if you said the 21-year-old had surpassed Jackson Holliday as the top prospect in baseball.
He was universally top 15 coming into the season, the tantalizing tools being enough to overcome a bumpy transition to Double-A (relatively speaking, anyway, though a .248 batting average and .827 OPS aren't most people's idea of bad). Mostly, it was the 33.7 percent strikeout rate in his 87 games at that level that gave evaluators pause. At 6-foot-7, Wood has a big strike zone, and so keeping the strikeouts in check always figured to be his biggest challenge. This year at Triple-A, though, he has cut that rate nearly in half, to 18.2 percent, with his strikeout-to-walk ratio going from 3-to-1 to 1-to-1.
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That's the sort of growth that might propel an already top prospect to the best in all of baseball, particularly when the upside is so palpable. Wood's ability to impact the ball is about as good as it gets. His 115.3 mph max exit velocity at Triple-A has been topped by only 18 major-leaguers this year, and his 95.1 mph average exit velocity is topped by only three, with two being Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. There's a reason why Wood was considered the most promising of the prospects acquired from the Padres in the Juan Soto deal a couple of years ago -- a haul that included C.J. Abrams and MacKenzie Gore.
So why might things go wrong in Wood's first major-league stint? Well, just scouting the stat line, the 53.5 percent ground-ball rate stands out as a problem. Much of his hard contact is delivered at a less-than-optimal angle, which explains why he has "only" 10 home runs in 225 plate appearances. You have to figure major-league pitchers will be even better at keeping the ball out of his wheelhouse, so the power output may be a little disappointing as he works to raise that launch angle.
But the bigger obstacle is the elevated difficulty curve encountered by all prospects breaking into the league right now. Between Wyatt Langford, Jackson Chourio, Holliday and a dozen other lesser misfires, it's understandable that a prospect pusher like myself would be frustrated. The league seems to chew up young hitters right now, for reasons we can only speculate, and it's made investing in such a player akin to a wild goose chase. But there will come another someday who thrives right from the get-go -- of that, I'm certain -- and the better bets to do so are the higher-caliber prospects. Wood is among the highest.
The best way to think of him is as a lottery ticket -- not a novel analogy, I know, but perhaps more fitting now than ever. If it doesn't work out, the cost was low and your life remains unchanged. But if it does ...
If it does and Wood delivers on his most optimistic outlook right away, then you may have a Kyle Tucker-caliber performer the rest of the way. Weighing the upside vs. the downside, I'm slotting Wood 26th in my outfield rankings, ahead of quality contributors like Tyler O'Neill and Heliot Ramos. Maybe I'll end up having to adjust down, but there's legitimate top-10 potential here at a weak position.
