The Washington Nationals continue to play an inconsistent brand of baseball that has unfortunately become a staple of their 2025 season. Despite winning a series against the New York Mets last week and playing the Philadelphia Phillies pretty closely over the weekend, the Nationals were walloped by the New York Yankees on Monday evening in the Bronx.
While the 10-5 final score does not look nearly as bad as the game really was, as the Nationals trailed 10-0 heading into the final frame before Jacob Young of all people hit a Grand Slam into the right-center field bullpen for his first homer of the season, one of the team's best players continued an uncomfortable trend.
After beginning to prep for the 2025 Home Run Derby, in which James Wood was eliminated in the first round, something changed for the young slugger. While I am no expert in hitting and have never claimed to be, it is no secret that he has not been the same player overall since early July when he began his preparation with third base coach Ricky Gutierrez. Wood, who was as steady of a contributor as anyone in baseball as his batting average climbed as high as .292, began to rack up strikeouts like nobody's business, and that trend has only continued.
The Nationals road trip to San Francisco, which saw Wood hit his first homer since the Home Run Derby, seemed like it was going to be a turning point for him, but he has continued to strike out at an alarming rate. As Mark Zuckerman from MASN Sports wrote, Wood leads the league in strikeouts with 174, adding 3 more on Monday to make his total 177, and he now needs only 47 more strikeouts to set the all-time single-season record.
That record was set by former Nationals slugger Mark Reynolds, who struck out 223 times back in 2009 when he was a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Wood has 31 more games to potentially break that all-time mark, and if he continues to persist at the rate he has been going, he might end up barreling through that number with room to spare in the end.
Hopefully for Wood, who has been hitting the ball hard and continuing to draw his walks, albeit it at a lesser rate than before, he can avoid making the wrong kind of history, as this is not what we were expecting when he was looking like an MVP candidate earlier this season.
Do you think James Wood will set the all-time single-season strikeouts record? As always, please let me know on X, @DCBerk.