- A mild left oblique strain put James Wood on the Nationals’ 10-day injured list Tuesday.
- Wood leads the majors with 100 runs and 90 walks, and has 30 home runs in 114 games.
- He ranked third in MLB.com’s most recent National League MVP poll, behind Shohei Ohtani and Pete Crow-Armstrong.
- The Nationals are 55-60 and have lost seven straight after selling at the trade deadline.
WASHINGTON – A mild left oblique strain sent James Wood to the 10-day injured list Tuesday, costing the Washington Nationals their All-Star outfielder for at least 10 days and idling the third-place finisher in MLB.com’s most recent National League MVP poll. It is the first injured list stint of the 23-year-old’s career.
A Seventh-Inning Swing, Then A Tuesday MRI
Wood felt the injury on the last swing of a seventh-inning at-bat in Monday night’s game against the Philadelphia Phillies, a groundout to first base. He reported that running and throwing were fine and that only swinging hurt. An MRI the next day found what manager Blake Butera called “a subtle, mild oblique strain on the left side”.
“We think it won’t be very extreme,” Butera said. “But we do think it will take at least the 10 days, which is why we’re IL-ing him.”
Wood had played every one of Washington’s 114 games this season.
What The Lineup Loses Is Not The Batting Average
Wood is hitting .265/.393/.535 with a .928 OPS, 30 home runs and 17 stolen bases. The average is ordinary and nothing else about the line is: his 100 runs and 90 walks both lead the majors, and the .393 on-base percentage ranks third in the National League.
The contact quality underneath it is better still. Baseball Savant puts his expected weighted on-base average at .419, on a scale where .320 is league average and .370 clears the bar for elite. He hits the ball hard 57.6 percent of the time against a league rate near 40 percent.
The plate discipline is the other half. Wood walks in 16.8 percent of his plate appearances, roughly double the 8.5 percent league average. His 28.6 percent strikeout rate sits well above the 22 percent league mark, the price of that approach rather than a hole in it.
Washington had already thinned the batting order around him. The Nationals sold into Monday’s trade deadline, dealing Curtis Mead to Boston on July 25, Luis Garcia Jr. to the New York Yankees on Aug. 2 and Foster Griffin to Cleveland on deadline day. They have lost seven straight to fall to 55-60, 14 games behind Atlanta in the NL East.
To fill the roster spot, the club promoted outfielder Andrew Pinckney from Triple-A Rochester for his major league debut. Pinckney, 25, hit .271/.345/.425 with 13 home runs and 18 stolen bases in 94 games at Rochester, a solid Triple-A line and not a substitute for a .928 OPS.
Player props and season-long award markets on legal MLB betting sites price what a correct ticket pays, never how likely an outcome is.
The MVP Race Moves Without Him
Wood was already a distant third. MLB.com’s most recent National League MVP poll, a survey of 34 of its writers and editors casting 5-4-3-2-1 ballots, had Ohtani first with 158 points and 23 first-place votes and Crow-Armstrong second with 140 points and 11. Wood was third with 74 points and no first-place votes.
His OPS led the National League at .953 when that poll ran; it has since settled to .928.
The layoff attacks the specific part of his case that was working. Rate stats survive 10 idle days intact. Counting stats do not, and the runs and walks leads are what make Wood legible to voters at all on a fourth-place team. Ohtani and Crow-Armstrong keep adding to their totals while his sit still.
Award futures hang on legal sports betting boards all season, and the National League MVP does not settle until November. A 10-day absence changes the payout long before it changes anybody’s ballot.
A minimum stay makes Wood eligible to come off the injured list on Aug. 14. The Nationals continue their series at Philadelphia on Wednesday.
