With the Washington Nationals trailing the Colorado Rockies 3-2 in the bottom of the 11th inning on June 19, outfielder James Wood stood at home plate, awaiting another pitch. He got a gift — a 90 mph splitter that hung over the inside half of home plate.

Wood swung, using his 6-foot 7-inch frame to launch the ball 430 feet over the center field wall at Nationals Park for his first walk-off home run of his career.

Reliever Seth Halverson headed for the dugout as soon as Wood made contact. He didn’t have to turn and watch the ball to know his pitch had cost his team the game against the struggling Nationals.

As Wood rounded third base, he tossed his helmet onto the side of the field and broke into a big smile before he jumped onto home plate, a rare show of emotion for the stoic young left fielder.

That game highlighted just one of this season’s many moments of stellar play for the Olney native – who marked another milestone by earning a spot in Monday’s Major League Baseball (MLB) home run derby and Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Atlanta for his outstanding start to the 2025 season.

A year after donning a Nationals uniform, Wood is considered not just the team’s best player, but one of MLB’s best outfielders. At the all-star break, he is ranked eighth in the major leagues in on-base plus slugging, a statistic used to measure hitters’ effectiveness at hitting for power and avoiding outs. In his first full season in the league, Wood trails only a select few star players such as the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani in this category.

Wood, who is 22 and under 200 games into his career, said he often has to reflect on where he is as he plays in his first full season with the Nationals.

“Every road trip going to a new stadium, whether I do it before the game or after the game driving home, I just look back … it’s kind of crazy to think about: This is the life we live,” Wood told Bethesda Today during a June phone interview.

Growing up in MoCo

Born in Adventist Healthcare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Wood grew up in Olney — an important distinction that his dad, Kenny Wood, says game announcers and Google fail to make, upsetting his son’s local fans.

“When they announce where he’s from, it says Rockville, right? That’s really the hospital, [and] people in Olney get upset,” says Kenny Wood, who remains there with his wife, Paula Wood.

James Wood is the youngest of the couple’s three children and has two older sisters, Kayla, 26, and Sydney, 25. Playing sports was a big part of growing up in the Wood family; Kenny Wood was a standout Division 1 basketball player at the University of Richmond, and is a member of the Virginia school’s athletics hall of fame.

Following in their dad’s footsteps, all three kids played basketball. Sydney Wood remembers competing with her brother from a young age on the basketball court and then marveling as his baseball skills developed.

“Whenever he was first playing, we’d watch his games and be like, ‘Hit a home run! Hit a home run!’ … I guess we thought he could just do whatever he wanted,” said Sydney Wood, who went on to play Division 1 college basketball at Northwestern University in Illinois. “I feel like we always saw pretty early on that he was different and he was special.”

While playing on a recreational basketball team coached by his dad during elementary school, James Wood also played for a travel baseball team, the Olney Pirates, which no longer exists. The Pirates were coached by a father of Wood’s teammates, who emphasized having fun and having his players try different positions, according to Kenny Wood.

“That was a big thing for him to start off from a baseball standpoint,” Kenny Wood said of his son. “I think that kind of gave him a good way to start, [a] good grounding in baseball, to realize what’s important at that age.”

James Wood said many of his best memories of growing up in Olney revolve around playing with the Pirates.

“I feel like I was really fortunate, that my travel ball team was the same group of guys more or less for five or six years,” Wood said. “We won a lot and winning is fun. We scored a lot of runs — that’s fun, too. A lot of [my favorite memories] come with that group of guys.”

Wood left Montgomery County Public Schools in middle school to attend Landon School, a private boys school in Bethesda, before transferring to St. John’s College High School (SJC) in Northwest D.C. and playing for the Cadets, a local athletics powerhouse coached by brothers Mark and Kevin Gibbs. The Cadets’ baseball team has won the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference nine out of the last 10 years, according to the Washington Post.

Kevin Gibbs told Bethesda today in an email that his son had played basketball with James Wood on the team’s coached by his dad while growing up. That’s when Gibbs had witnessed Wood’s physical prowess and raw talent.

“As he got into eighth grade we made a big push to have him attend St. John’s,” Gibbs wrote. “I told Mark [Gibbs] that he would be the best player to ever come out of SJC.”

Upon arrival at St. John’s, Wood quickly found his way on to the varsity baseball and basketball teams, where he made a big impression.

“I can remember a game against [Baltimore private school] Gilman early in his sophomore year when he pinch-hit late and blasted a home run over the batting cages in centerfield, dead into the wind. Everyone’s jaw just dropped,” Gibbs wrote.

Despite his son’s growing prestige on the baseball field, Kenny Wood believed James should continue to play multiple sports. The elder Wood recalled hearing that advice from ESPN MLB analyst and Bethesda native Tim Kurkjian when his son was 11.

“[Kurkjian] just said ‘have him play basketball for as long as he can, even though he loves baseball’,” Kenny Wood said. “You want him to stay active and want him to stay athletic, using different muscles and body parts, and you don’t [want him to] get burnt out.”

Gibbs wrote that he would always send college coaches clips of James Wood dunking on the basketball court as well as baseball highlights to demonstrate his explosiveness.

At the conclusion of Wood’s sophomore year at St. John’s, he transferred to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, a training factory for elite high school athletes.

Gibbs was sad to lose Wood, whom he described as a great player and person. “James was also a terrific kid,” Gibbs wrote. “He was humble, considerate and nice to everyone. He worked hard and never complained when things didn’t go his way.”

Wood returned home to Olney when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the academy to shut down during the spring of his junior year. With his dad and sister’s help, Wood followed a training program provided by the academy’s coaches and trainers, he put on about 25 pounds of muscle, filling in his previously lanky frame.

Later that summer, James went to Atlanta to try out for Under Armour’s All-American game  and work out with some of the other top recruits in the high school class of 2021. That’s where Kenny Wood began to realize just how far his son could go.

“We go into the [batting] cages and I’m watching them hit, [then] I’m watching James. I’m watching them run, [then] I’m watching James,” Wood said. “I kind of had a thought like, all right, if these guys are top five or 10 in the class, where the heck is he?”

James Wood parlayed that experience into a strong senior year showing at IMG. He then decided to forego his previous college commitment to Mississippi State University and to enter the 2021 MLB draft, where he was selected by the San Diego Padres in the second round.

Returning home

After just more than a year playing for the minor league teams in the Padres organization, James Wood and his family received some shocking news.

Wood had been traded to the Nationals as part of a blockbuster deal that sent the Nationals’ then 23-year-old mega-star Juan Soto to San Diego. Wood said his reaction wasn’t what many assumed.

“Definitely a lot of uncertainty, I mean I think a lot of people expected me to be super thrilled and happy …. I was, but it took some time,” Wood said.

Kenny Wood said he thought his son needed time to get over the idea that the Padres were willing to let him go.

“Even though it’s coming home, you almost don’t think about that at first,” Kenny Wood said. “You think about, ‘Oh, shoot. This team doesn’t want me.’ ”

James Wood’s uncertainty didn’t show on the baseball diamond. In 2023, his first full year with the Nationals’ minor league affiliates, he hit 26 home runs and stole 18 bases, moving from the High-A team in Wilmington, Delaware, to the Double-A team in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, about a quarter through the season.

He started 2024 with the Nationals’ Triple-A team in Rochester, New York. Fans soon began to realize the player who seemed like one small element of the Soto trade could end up being the next face of the franchise. In 52 games, Wood posted a batting average of .353 with an on-base percentage of .463, earning him a call-up to the big leagues on July 1, 2024, according to Baseball Reference.

Wood began to gain traction not just among Nationals fans, but across the league for his power, towering height, and athleticism. In the second half of the 2024 season, he showed flashes of how good he could be, while adjusting to the highest level of baseball.

Wood said the opportunity to resume working with a hitting coach he bonded with while in high school, Gerardo “Coach G” Caceres, a former professional baseball player in Venezuela where he was born and raised, helped him adjust.

He credits Caceres for creating a training environment in which he felt comfortable to be himself and could grow, making it an easy choice to continue training with Caceres when he returned to the D.C. area.

“I just feel like we grow together and we have fun together,” Wood said. “It’s a good environment — he might be the only one that likes to work harder than me.”

No matter how successful Wood is, Caceres said he’s not afraid to tell him the truth.

“A lot of people, they’re afraid to talk to him … I’m not,” Caceres said. “Everybody’s talking about the great things he’s doing. I’m like, ‘God, your strike percentage is really high. You need to bring it down.’”

Caceres said while fans and analysts credit Wood’s physical attributes, like size and speed for his success, he is one of the smartest players that Caceres has ever coached. When Wood was getting frustrated because he kept rolling grounders to the first and second basemen, Caceres told him to start trying to rip balls to left field.

“At some point he applied that in the minor leagues, and that’s when he became a .300 hitter,” Caceres said.

Wood now has one of the most powerful opposite-field swings in baseball. His work with Caceres has caught the attention of his teammates, and the coach said he now trains other players in the Nationals’ organization such as infielders Trey Lipscomb and Nasim Nuñez.

Low-key attitude

In contrast to his attention-demanding power, Wood remains soft-spoken maintaining a similar facial expression whether he strikes out or slams a home run to center field.

“I think people think he doesn’t have a personality because he’s quiet, but he’s really funny,” Sydney Wood said. “I think it’s easy for people to make that assumption, just because of how he carries himself.”

Wood laughed at his sister’s assessment, but said he’s not concerned about what others think about his personality.

“People close to me know what type of person I am,” Wood said. “That’s the most important thing to me.”

Despite his stoic nature, Wood is now a role model for local kids who love baseball. He is considered the Nationals’ most electric player, generating raucous applause every time he comes up to bat when team plays at home. His No. 29 jersey is becoming an increasingly common piece of apparel in the metro area.

Wood and his family are still adjusting to that reality.

“It’s pride, it’s honor,” Kenny Wood said. “Seeing our last name out there, people buying it and investing their hard-earned money into getting a jersey to kind of represent him.”

James Wood said he is looking to expand his influence off the baseball diamond. He mentors a group of young Black baseball players in the area, meeting with them to check in on their development on and off the field. He wants to figure out more ways to give back to the community that turned him into a star.

“As I’m getting older, I’d like to find ways other than just on the field to make an impact,” Wood said. “If I can do that, that will be great.”