James Wood Is Redefining the Minimum Acceptable Launch Angle

It can be difficult to contextualize just how unusual James Wood’s offensive profile really is. He hits the ball so very hard. He hits the ball in the air so very never. In his major league debut last season, the Nationals outfielder put 198 balls into play. Only five of them were fly balls to the pull side. Of the 403 batters who put at least 100 balls in play last season, that 2.5% rate put Wood in 385th place. As for those five pulled fly balls, they turned into two home runs, two doubles, and one very loud flyout.

That seems like a promising avenue for further investigation, doesn’t it? The kind of batted ball that turns into an extra-base hit at roughly the same rate that dentists recommend, you know, brushing? If Wood could figure out how to pull the ball in the air with any sort of regularity, he’d be one of the game’s great sluggers. And yet here we are a month into the season: Wood has not at all figured that out, and somehow he’s one of the game’s great sluggers anyway. He’s running a 153 wRC+ and a top-10 isolated slugging percentage because his prodigious power allows him to get the absolute most out of one of the least optimized profiles in the game.

Wood was one of the most powerful players in the game from the moment he debuted last season, but he has increased his 90th-percentile exit velocity by two full ticks, his average exit velocity by 1.6 mph, and his hard-hit rate by four percentage points. For the first three weeks of the season, Wood pulled exactly zero fly balls or line drives, but he was still just two home runs off the league lead, because although he hits the ball harder to the pull side like everyone else, he hits it hard enough to get it over the fence in any direction he pleases.

So far this season, 29% of Wood’s line drives and fly balls have turned into home runs, the highest rate in baseball. If you expand your query to extra-base hits, Wood is in first place by a huge margin: 48.4% of his line drives and fly balls have turned into doubles, triples, or homers. At 41.9%, Ben Rice is the only other player above 40%. There is quite literally no one like Wood in this department. I got curious about just how rare this was, so I looked for data over the entirety of the pitch tracking era. If you set a minimum of 100 air balls, there have only been eight seasons above 40%. Giancarlo Stanton set the record of 45.1% in his 2017 MVP season. Wood is far from the lead when it comes to individual months, but that’s the company he’s keeping right now. When he lifts the ball even the tiniest bit, he’s unstoppable.

I could keep going with the wild stats. Wood’s average line drive travels 302 feet, one foot behind Byron Buxton for the farthest in baseball this season. However, he hits his average line drive 4.6 mph harder than Buxton. He’s behind in distance only because, of course, his line drives have a much lower launch angle than Buxton’s do. And on top of all that, Sports Info Solutions, which has a different definition of line drive rate than Statcast, says that Wood is actually running the lowest line drive rate in baseball right now!

Here’s why I really wanted to talk to you about all this. Last week, Wood started pulling the ball in the air. Last season, 7.6% of his balls in play were fly balls or line drives to the pull side. Up until last Wednesday, April 23, Wood was at 0%. Zero percent. As in, he hadn’t done it once. Well, over the past week, he’s done it three times. Would you like to see how that went for him?

It went: two home runs, one double. With those three balls, Wood’s pulled air ball rate is now at 3.9%. Below, I’ve combined Wood’s Statcast launch angle charts from the last two seasons. The 2024 season is in red, and the 2025 season is in blue. The purple is where they overlap. I’d like you to notice a few things. Right off the bat, I’d like to point out that Wood is breaking the chart. It’s not really designed to go to 100. There isn’t enough space for three digits at the top, so the 1 and the H are right on top of each other. Dude hits the ball hard.

Next, I’d like you to notice all that lonely red at the top and bottom. Wood has not popped out once this season! Only one player, Brice Turang, has put more balls in play without a single popout. Likewise, Wood has not yet hit a ball at or below -50 degrees this season. I know that’s a ridiculously low bar, but he did it eight different time last season. Wood still hits tons of balls on the ground, but he has narrowed his launch angle distribution considerably and is doing a much better job of avoiding the very worst batted balls. That small step has allowed him to drop his ratio of groundballs to fly balls from 2.50 to 1.84. That’s still a very high number, but it’s a huge improvement, and it has everything to do with his skyrocketing production.

The last thing I’d like you to notice is smaller. There’s a blue spike at 25 degrees, another at 0 degrees, and a red spike at -15 degrees. That red spike in particular is important. One good way to judge a player’s swing path is to see where they hit the ball their absolute hardest. Last season, that was at -15 degrees, but this season it has shifted upwards. Wood’s swing seems to be geared less toward the ground now. Here’s another way to show that.

Wood’s average exit velocity has increased across the board. He’s getting comfortable, he’s swinging at more fastballs and fewer breaking balls, and his patience is forcing pitchers to hit the middle of the strike zone more often. But the biggest difference is coming when he puts the ball in the air, specifically on his line drives. If we look at hard-hit rate, the difference becomes more stark.

Wood’s hard-hit rates on groundballs and fly balls are more or less unchanged, but look at line drive rate! It’s through the roof. We’re talking about a small sample here, but when Wood is hitting line drives, he is murdering them.

I know it’s not April anymore, but I still need to end by saying that I have no idea how long this will last. I mean, I expect Wood to keep hitting the ball extremely hard for the next 15 years or so, but when it comes to his ability to keep launching the ball, I’m not sure of anything. We’ve all been burned before. Remember when it looked briefly like Ke’Bryan Hayes or Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had finally figured out how to lift the ball? It’s too soon to hop all the way on the bandwagon.

Even so, Wood is a fascinating player for any number of reasons. He’s got great athleticism, but it very much remains to be seen whether he can turn that into even decent defense. He’s quite possibly too passive at the plate, with one of the game’s lowest zone swing rates, but he’s walking a ton, and all that loud contact very clearly indicates that he’s not exactly missing his pitch to hit. And lastly, of course, he’s got this amazing gift for scalding the ball, even if it’s mostly downwards. It’s extremely fun when he pulls the ball in the air — he hits the ball so hard that veteran announcers can’t help but laugh — but he’s shown that he doesn’t necessarily have to do so in order to be productive. He just needs to hit the ball in the air every once in a while.