Divergent - to turn aside or deviate, as from a path, practice, or plan.
Divergent - to extend in different directions from a common point.
Divergent - having no finite limits.
All definitions are from Dictionary.com
Baseball is a game of numbers. It is a game of logic. Everything in baseball is supposed to make sense. Predicting which players are most likely to make the majors is one way teams use draft models. Teams also use stuff models to evaluate how likely a pitcher is to find success in the majors. Teams avoid taking on too much risk because missing can cost you millions. They choose to trust the models that tell them 6’7” hitters rarely find success in the majors. That reliance on models lets the highest upside player fall in the draft. Fall all the way down to AJ Preller and the San Diego Padres in the second round.
We often expect player development to be linear. A player who was striking out 28.9% of the time in their senior season of high school was never supposed to hit for a high average in the major leagues. That wouldn’t make sense. Players don’t see their strikeout rate drop when moving from high school to Low-A. Especially when they are 6’7” and everyone assumed their hit tool would only get worse as they climbed up through the minors.
There are times that conventional thinking fails. Sometimes, a player is just divergent. A Player who deviates from the set path and bucks any normal developmental curve. Some defy the known limits and redefine the boundaries of their profile. Sometimes players find another gear and raise both their floor and ceiling overnight. Other times, 5’6” hitters have thirty home run seasons despite it making almost no sense at all. James Wood might be the next divergent to take the league by storm.
Coming out of the draft, James Wood had a suspect hit tool. Neither I nor one major publication had James Wood graded as an above-average hitter at that point. It is almost impossible to justify calling a player with a strikeout rate of nearly 30%, even an average hitter, so nobody did. Strictly looking at raw numbers, I can make a convincing argument that James Wood has the best hit tool in the entire minor leagues. This is just one year after being universally considered below-average.
There are three stats that I primarily look at when trying to scout a hit tool. The first is obviously the in-zone contact rate. The second is the chase rate. Showing good plate discipline and not expanding the zone in pursuit of unhittable pitches is a key skill to hit for an average in the major leagues. There will only be more unhittable pitches at the next level, so swinging at them now is a red flag for future plate discipline projection. (Unless it is deliberate, and they are chasing to learn how to hit the pitch).
The Three Metrics
Not including players drafted this year, there are 63 hitters on our mid-season top 100 prospects list here at Prospects Live. Of those 63 hitters, James Wood is eleventh in zone-contact rate at 86.3%. He is thirteenth in chase rate at 18.6%. Only Iván Herrera, Evan Carter, and Logan O’Hoppe are ahead of James Wood in both chase rate and in-zone contact rate. Those three players are commonly regarded as having great hit tools. James Wood is the outlier here who is supposedly below-average. He should never be mentioned in the same sentence as those three according to some scouts, but here Wood is all the same.
Except I said there were three primary stats I look at when evaluating a hit tool. I have only listed two of them so far, and neglected perhaps the most important one. The other major part of the hit tool I look at is the ability to hit the ball at optimal angles. Avoiding mishit balls, and hitting the ball in the sweet-spot is crucial to running high BAcons at the MLB level. In the statcast era, the average batted ball hit with a launch angle between 8° and 32° has a .591 BAcon and a .696 wOBA. That is completely independent of power. If you can hit the ball at optimal angles regularly, then you are probably going to run high BAcons.
This is where James Wood laps the entire field. James Wood has a 44.2% sweet-spot rate this year. Of those three players who beat James Wood in both chase rate and in-zone contact rate, the highest sweet-spot rate is from Evan Carter at just 28.1%. Let’s zoom back out and look at the entire field of 63 players on our top 100. James Wood still laps the field with the second best sweet-spot rate belonging to Heston Kjerstad at only 37.2%. A literal mile behind James Wood.
This is even more impressive because Wood has other strong BAcon indicators. He is also avoiding mishits with just a 2.3% popup rate. In addition, James Wood has some of the best raw power in the entire minor leagues. The average hard-hit ball has .500 batting average, and Wood is already hitting just under 50% of his batted balls hard.
James Wood is also hitting more balls the other way than he is hitting to his pull side. Whether you prefer old school or new school stats for evaluating a hit tool, James Wood exceeds all expectations. James Wood might wind up with some of the highest BAcons in all of baseball during his prime. He could do that while simultaneously running both impressive walk and strikeout rates.
I am not saying that James Wood has the best hit tool in the entire minor leagues, despite what the numbers might suggest. James Wood is still in Low-A and is 6’7”. It is very difficult for a player his size to control their rhythm and timing consistently. It is a titanic ask to expect consistent swing mechanics from a player with such long levers. The athleticism helps, but most major league players are good athletes. Very few of those plus athletes actually succeed with a body this size.
(Almost) No One Like Him
Since the turn of the century, there have only been four seasons where someone who is at least 6’6” posted a sub 20% strikeout rate. Three of those seasons belong to Corey Hart and the fourth was José Martínez in 2018. Corey Hart still ran below-average zone-contact rates in all three of those years. Hart just swung often enough that he rarely reached two-strike counts and as such, kept the strikeouts down. José Martínez is, to the best of my knowledge, the only player within an inch of James Wood to even post average zone-contact rates while qualifying.
List of the best seasons by someone 6’6” or taller by K% this century (Min 350 PA)
The odds of James Wood being the second player to run high contact rates with this size are probably not very high. At the same time, I don’t think it’s impossible. James Wood had a bad spring at IMG in 2021 but prior to that, Wood looked like a solid hitter who could post a respectable batting average. He also hit nearly .500 over the summer circuit back in 2020 against the best prep arms in the country.
The swing is very loose with a simple and clean bat path. There is not a lot of excess movement when James Wood swings the bat. It is hard for giants like James Wood to maintain their swing mechanics, but Wood has a very low-maintenance swing. This means that is less of a concern for him than his fellow behemoths.
The timing got messed up in the spring of 2021, but as soon as the Padres drafted him, they made adjustments to help him stay further into his backside. After that, the contact skills took off. In rookie ball last year, Wood might have struck out 31.7% of the time. Yet, his contact rates were above-average at 82.9% in the strike zone. His strikeouts resulted from his newfound patience at the plate that hadn’t been refined into the good plate discipline it would become this year.
Aaron Judge, way back in 2014, spent his first season in the minors after being drafted out of Fresno State the previous year. Judge was 22 at the time and still ran a lower in-zone contact rate, a higher chase rate, and a sweet-spot rate that was over 20% lower than Wood is at this year. Aaron Judge is inarguably the best hitter this size in a long time. James Wood is three years younger than Aaron Judge was when he was in Low-A and is outmatching him in every area except for exit velocities.
This does not mean that Wood will be Aaron Judge by any stretch, it just means that Wood is a completely unique player. We can’t just say tall players rarely hit, so Wood won’t either. Players this size have never had hit metrics this impressive in Low-A either — until Wood. If Wood can be an outlier while 19-years-old, and in Low-A; we can’t discount the possibility that he will remain one moving forwards.
The Power Is Elite
Wood is not a one-dimensional hitter. He was drafted for his elite raw power and that has not gone away as the hit tool has improved by leaps and bounds. If anything, the more effective backside in his swing had led to him hitting for more power than ever before. The swing is incredible. He has amazing shoulder abduction and premium bat speed. There is good hip-torso separation every time he swings the bat and the whole body is used to hit the baseball with explosive impact. Wood’s long levers let him create leverage, and he uses that leverage to consistently generate hard contact.
The measurables are probably even more impressive. Wood has a 90th percentile exit velocity of 107.9 MPH this year. That is the fourth highest of the 63 hitters on the Prospects Live Top 100 behind only Triston Casas, Jordan Walker, and Elly De La Cruz. His hard-hit rate is the fifth highest. Wood has already hit a ball at 114.3 MPH before he even turned 20. That max exit velocity is in the 95th percentile of major leaguers already. I suspect that Wood will only get stronger in the coming years as he grows into his long-levered frame.
I also already discussed how many batted balls Wood hits at optimal angles and that will not only help his BAcon but that will let the power play up to its potential in games. The lack of pull side contact maybe causes some game power concerns, but Wood accelerates incredibly quickly and has enough raw strength that even going the other way, he is usually posting plus exit velocities.
A True Athlete
James Wood is an underappreciated athlete. He posted elite run times in high school, and hasn’t really lost a step since. The disagreement among scouts is how the body projects. Some scouts think Wood will get a lot thicker in his lower body and slide all the way down to a below-average runner. Others — myself included — think that Wood has a rare physique and, like Aaron Judge, can maintain above-average speed, even as he grows into more strength.
James Wood has almost exclusively played centerfield to date. I think he has looked pretty good in centerfield with an impressive amount of range in the gaps due to his long speed. He also makes good reads while tracking flyballs and is an efficient route runner in a small sample. The question is still body progression, so he’s a fringy fit in centerfield because of the physical development risk. I struggle to imagine that changing soon, given that it’s years out from being an actual concern in the present. However, with elite arm strength, I think that even if he is forced out of centerfield, he would still be a plus defensive option in right field.
Wood ranked No.20 on our mid-season top 100 prospects list. That is likely the lowest you will ever see him ranked here. Every day that the hit tool doesn’t collapse, there is another person buying in on Wood being the next superstar. Once he gets the chance to play in High-A+, he could soar. The question with Wood is not tools, but if the hit tool can actually be an anomaly. If he can continue to perform at such a high level in the upper minors and eventually, the majors. If the hit tool translates, there is not a better prospect in all of baseball. The offensive upside is unparalleled and Wood should provide at least some defensive value.
There is a common euphemism in scouting. Scouts tend to say: “This is what it looks like.” James Wood is not what it is supposed to look like in any way, shape, or form. Wood has refused to follow the plan any analysts had for him before the draft. Whereas most players with his physical profile would struggle to hit for contact at all, Wood has gone off in a different direction from that common point.
Wood is trying to pave his own road in a brand new mold of player. He’s not trying to be Joey Gallo, or even Aaron Judge. He is trying to be James Wood. The hit tool was not supposed to be remotely good, yet here we are, debating if it could be elite. Development is non-linear and James Wood embodies that fact. If the hit tool is as great as Wood has flashed, there is no finite limit to his upside. James Wood is the definition of a divergent.