The Juan Soto trade left big shoes to fill — enter 6-foot-6 center fielder James Wood

James Wood is listed at 6-foot-6, but that can’t be right because his legs alone are at least 6 feet long. On a cool spring day in Lakewood, New Jersey, he is shivering in a pair of shorts that look like outgrown hand-me-downs on his lanky frame. Last year, he lost about a dozen pounds during the season, when his diet of Chick-fil-A fries and lemonade failed to sufficiently fuel the grind of pro baseball.

It’s the legs that make even Wood’s speed look unhurried. As he lopes through the outfield shagging fly balls before the game, there’s so much air visible in every stride that it lends him the effect of floating.

And if Wood looks laidback from afar, the impression is only amplified up close. When a coach insists that he’s actually a loquacious jokester, Wood laughs a little, and it sounds almost nervous. The coach is kidding, Wood clarifies, even though he doesn’t need to.

But that’s the only time, across several meetings, that Wood seems nervous. Mostly, he just seems comfortable being quiet.

Last year was rough for the Washington Nationals. Their 55-107 record was the worst in Major League Baseball (and following a change to the CBA, they were the first worst team to not get the No. 1 draft pick in exchange for their ineptitude). Just three years removed from winning the 2019 World Series, most of their championship core was gone, dealt at the 2021 deadline in a stunning exodus of talent.

Still, though, at the heart of the Nats’ lineup was one of the most dynamic young players in the game — a paradox of proven success and valuable youth, iconic aggression and preeminent plate discipline. Juan Soto was 23 years old and had already spent more than a quarter of his life in the organization. But when reports leaked that he and his agent, Scott Boras, had rejected the Nationals’ $440 million extension offer, the relationship severed.

A few weeks later, Soto was traded, leaving the Nationals without a star or a quick path back to contention — and with a question that will take years to fully answer: Was the return for Soto worth it?

In this era of unprecedented interest in the big picture of baseball organizations, fans won’t — and don’t have to — simply wait around from now until then. For a rebuilding team such as the Nationals, the future of the franchise is as much a part of the discourse as wins and losses. Dealing Soto to the San Diego Padres was an end and a beginning all at once — or at least, that’s the hope of all franchise-altering trades.

In this case, the deal closed a championship chapter with familiar characters in D.C., and the handful of prospects the Nationals got in return, including Wood, started writing the next one right away. It’s just not clear what it’s about yet.

For his part, Wood cites a small handful of subjects that he can talk about with enthusiasm: video games, music (all types, though he prefers not to listen elsewhere to anything he hears at the ballpark), shoes, clothes and baseball.

James Wood is not among them.

'Oh, this is a gold mine'

Here are the biographical cliff notes: Wood grew up a Yankees fan, despite living in the D.C. area. His favorite player was Curtis Granderson. His earliest memory of baseball was swinging a wiffle bat. In his mind, the hollow plastic bat resembled the one Barry Bonds swung when he was slugging all those home runs. What about it looked like the 34-inch, 31.6-oz Canadian maple bat that Bonds used for the part of his career Wood (born in 2002) would’ve seen?

“Nothing at all,” he said.

James’ father, Kenny Wood, played Division I college basketball at Richmond. Growing up, James played both sports. His sisters still play basketball, but while basketball practice felt like a chore to James, “I could hit all day,” he said.

In his junior year, Wood left his Maryland high school to attend IMG Academy in Florida, something of a finishing school for potential professional athletes.

“The very first day I saw him swing,” IMG hitting coordinator John-Ford Griffin said, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a gold mine.’”

That said, height is not necessarily considered an asset for hitters. For one thing, it creates a bigger strike zone. The long levers can make it difficult for larger players to get to pitches on the inside part of the zone, to be quick to the ball. There are also just a lot of moving parts inherent in every swing, and more size means more opportunity for something to go wrong. For those reasons, position players of a certain height often end up transitioning to pitching, where their size provides an advantage.

But Griffin saw a towering teenager who could control his body easily and expertly. Wood didn’t torque his torso too much, over-creating power. “And as long as his arms are, he was able to pull his hands inside of the baseball better than anybody I've seen,” Griffin said.

Wood started at IMG in 2020, and his time there introduced him to what it looks like to take the sport seriously. Forced to go home during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he focused on working out more, and it was then that he realized he had a real shot to be drafted.

His senior year didn’t help his stock, though. Yes, he was strong and strapping and attracting all sorts of scout attention. He even hit a ball into a parking lot far beyond the outfield fence that Griffin estimated must’ve gone 500 feet.

“He came back to the dugout, [and] I went over to him and gave him a big hug,” Griffin said. “And he just smiles, and he goes, ‘You like that?’”

The problem was Wood was also striking out a lot. Especially at the end of the season, when he slumped at the worst possible time. His draft stock fell as teams got spooked by his swing-and-miss and by the way his unshakable sense of ease read as apathy.

“A lot of people took it as he didn't care,” Griffin said, “that he was being lazy and lethargic. And I'm just like, man, you wait.”

'We set the bar very, very high'

Wood fell all the way to the second round of the 2021 MLB Draft, where the San Diego Padres took him. That summer, he hit .372 with an OPS of 1.000 in 26 games at Rookie Ball. A year later, he had an OPS of 1.054 for the Padres’ A-ball affiliate when, 30 minutes into a four-hour bus ride, he found out on Twitter that he’d been traded to the Nationals. As soon as his team reached its destination, he turned right around, packed his things and flew east.

“It's like a bittersweet moment kind of because, like, obviously, it's a great opportunity,” Wood said. “But a lot of those guys, I might not see them again. I probably won't see them 'til I see them in the big leagues.”

In exchange for Soto and Josh Bell, the Padres sent the Nationals two rookies — shortstop C.J. Abrams and left-handed pitcher MacKenzie Gore — and three high-upside, low-level prospects: outfielder Robert Hassell III, right-handed pitcher Jarlin Susana and Wood. A few months before, FanGraphs had ranked all five of them among the Padres’ top 10 prospects. Abrams, Gore, Hassell and Wood made up four of the top five.

“We had to get the right deal, or we weren’t going to do the deal,” Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said at the time. “We set the bar very, very high, and one team exceeded it. And that’s the deal we made.”

For Wood, the trade represented something of a homecoming. He spent the rest of the 2022 season in Fredericksburg with the Nationals’ A-ball affiliate, about an hour-and-a-half from where he grew up. His dad attended every home game, bringing friends, family and former teammates to watch Wood begin the long journey toward trying to replace an icon.

“It can be a lot sometimes,” he said — about playing close enough for his parents to constantly check on him, not about any implicit pressure from his entrée into the Nationals’ system.

'He could play wherever you put him'

“I told them it’s an opportunity to do something special for the Nationals,” Washington manager Dave Martinez said this spring training of his message to the gaggle of prospects who will be forever tied to Soto.

About Wood in particular: “He understands the strike zone. The biggest thing for young hitters is understanding what you're really good at and what you can hit really well. Accepting your walks,” Martinez said. “And he's done that. The last person we had like that was Soto.”

The Nationals’ director of player development, however, expressed a little skepticism about that particular comp. “I don't know if I'm going to put him in that category,” De Jon Watson said. Still, Watson said his initial impression of Wood was that “he was so far advanced, especially with his strike zone knowledge and his ability to manage the zone.”

How to square that with the main pre-draft knock on Wood — too many strikeouts his senior year in high school?

Watson dismissed that concern as overblown; it wasn’t that many strikeouts for someone who was still just a kid. Wood’s coach at the time, Griffin, said the strikeouts came from trying to force at-bats at a time when Wood was being pitched around. The whiffs compounded when he tried to adjust his swing in response to expanding the zone.

“I feel like I always had a good grasp of the strike zone,” Wood said, quietly.

Looking back on those early struggles, he starts to say he handled it better than he could have, then stops himself and considers tempering that sentiment before forging on with uncharacteristic certitude.

“Actually, yeah,” he said. “I feel like I did manage it the best I could have.”

Wood will need at least that much confidence going forward. Even for the highest draft picks, the minor leagues are littered with landmines that derail careers. Wood learned quickly that in pro ball, pitchers come armed with personalized attack plans. It takes conviction to not fall into their traps and instead wait for your pitch.

And then there’s the other side of the ball. Plenty of future big-leaguers find themselves changing defensive positions as they move up through the minors. When they don’t move to the mound, supersized players often end up in less athletic positions — the corner outfield spots or something even more slugging-specific, such as first base or DH.

But for Wood, it’s a point of pride to prove that he can stay in center field. And some current and budding stars are already challenging the traditional way of thinking. The Pirates’ Oneil Cruz is a 6-foot-7 shortstop. Top Cardinals prospect Jordan Walker and his 6-foot-6 frame might still be playing third base if 10-time Gold Glover Nolan Arenado weren’t entrenched at the hot corner in St. Louis. And, of course, there’s Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ 6-foot-7 reigning MVP, whose free agency ahead of his age-31 season this past winter forced teams to reconsider how someone his size will age. Judge regularly plays right, but part of his $360 million value comes from his being able to capably man center field for the most famous franchise in the sport.

Wood says their swings are too different for him to directly model anything he does after Judge, but he gets why some people make that connection.

“He's ridiculous. He's a special player,” he said. “So even getting those comparisons, it's a blessing.”

And for now, the Nationals see no reason to move Wood out of center.

“Having done player development for 12 years now — 10 with the Dodgers and two here — I’ve never had a player this tall as graceful as he is and as quick as he is to the baseball,” Watson said. “He could play wherever you put him.”

'I don't really play baseball to be famous'

When the prospect rankings dropped ahead of this season, Wood was near the top. In less than two years, he’d gone from amateur disappointment to one of the top 10 or even top three prospects in baseball. The Nationals sent him to High-A, where he played 42 games — 29 in center — before moving up to Double-A at the end of May.

Shortly before that promotion, Wood told Yahoo Sports that he struggled to picture life in the big leagues. He wasn’t even sure where to start.

Across the country, Soto is learning how being publicly tied to huge sums of money — even if rejected — tends to intensify the spotlight on a person until it can seem more like they’re under interrogation than on a stage. If the Nationals’ trade was worth it, a version of that spotlight — be it soft and flattering or harsh and fluorescent — will find Wood eventually. But for now, he’s 20 years old and still seems to be adjusting to baseball being his full-time job.

“I don't know. I don't really play baseball to be famous,” he said when asked to envision the future for someone of his potential.

The minors can be, well, miserable. Bad motels and long-shot odds, trying not to question yourself despite playing a game that involves making an out far more often than not. Walking back to the dugout — or later, on a long bus ride — guys can get to putting pressure on themselves to perform, even if they’re not the subjects of intense speculation, part of the supposed pot of gold on the other side of a 100-loss season.

“As long as you’re not taking it too serious, you can have as much fun with it as you want,” Wood said. “I just think when you start taking it, like, super serious, start constraining yourself, that's when it gets a little stressful. And no one wants to be out here being stressed out all the time, so I try to keep it loose.”

That’s an impressive soliloquy coming from Wood and an impressive mindset for someone in his position. Has he noticed, though, the guys around him falling into the trap of overthinking?

“I think I catch myself doing it, too, sometimes. It’s hard not to,” he admitted. “Have a bad day or have a bad week, it’s hard not to kind of press about, like, ‘Oh, I should be doing this. I could be doing all that stuff.’ It’s kinda just, like, a constant fight.”

Yet from the outside, it really does look like he’s floating.