While Juan Soto is far from signing a deal with the Washington Nationals as a free agent, we can confidently pencil in from left to right: James Wood, Jacob Young, and Dylan Crews as your starting 2025 outfield with Alex Call as your bench outfielder. A new name has emerged from the Salt River Rafters roster in the Arizona Fall League (AFL): Robert Hassell III. Kind of left for roadkill next to the armadillo I passed on Interstate 8 back in 1988, Hassell is rocking in October as Bobby Barrells again.
Once the highest rated Nats prospect after coming over to the Nats in the Soto trade in mid-2022, Hassell was secretly playing through a partially fractured hamate that eventually got so bad in September of that year, that he needed surgery. A subsequent unrelated wrist injury in 2023 set Hassell back, and he fell well out of the Top-100 prospects. The Nats have a Rule-5 decision coming up shortly. Now, Hassell has an opportunity and is shining in the Arizona sun in the AFL. In fact, for players with at least 30 at-bats, Hassell ranks second in the league with a 1.254 OPS, five doubles, and 12 RBIs.
“I know a lot of these [AFL] guys have gone on to play in the big leagues, and I’m hoping to do the same soon.”
— Hassell said to MLB.com
“I feel really great this time around, healthy, and that’s the main thing.”
To start the 2025 season, it would be difficult to envision a bench of two pure outfielders unless one was the main DH like a Jesse Winker type. Remember, Call finished his 2024 season with a smoldering hot 23-games that ended with a plantar fasciitis rupture in his foot. In that span, Call hit a hot .349 with a .967 OPS and above average defense. As Sao Magnifico noted this week, “as a pesky hitter, he saw an average 4.32 pitches per plate appearance, which would have ranked second in MLB among qualified hitters if he had enough plate appearances to qualify.”
One of the most significant revelations was that Crews was excellent in outfield defense. While he started slowly in that acclimation phase, once he got going he led all of the Nats in the month of September in OAA defense, even surpassing Young who is a Gold Glove finalist and was playing on tired legs towards the end of the season. You could certainly see scenarios where both Young and Crews are Gold Glove finalists for the 2025 season.
The new outfield will be defensively superior to the previous outfield configurations that had games of Winker in LF, Eddie Rosario in CF, and Lane Thomas in RF, and that was a bumbling, stumbling, fumbling trio of outfielders that combined for a negative -20 OAA in much less than half a season. Yes, Wood is listed as a -6 OAA and -4 of that is coming in on balls in the air that he has not been aggressive enough on. That is the part of his game he must improve on or else the Nats will be forced to move him to DH or first base.
With the much-improved outfield defense, the Nats pitching will be the beneficiaries of the upgrades. By the way, Soto was also named a Rawlings Gold Glove finalist even though he was a -4.0 OAA and by most measures — didn’t earn those honors. But if the Nats were to acquire Soto as a free agent and move him back to left field, he would statistically be an upgrade over Wood on paper.
College football iconic coach, Bear Bryant, was credited with saying, “Offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships”. Bryant won six national titles at the University of Alabama. Those words were uttered by Alex Rodriguez in the pre-game on FOX on Wednesday about the baseball playoffs. If you combine defense and pitching, sure, many of us remember the classic 1966 World Series where defense was the difference in pitching duels with just 10 earned runs in that series. Sandy Koufax gave up one earned run to Jim Palmer‘s zero to show how you beat an ace. But these ALDS, NLDS, ALCS, and NLCS have looked like combinations of spectacular and horrific defense wrapped into the same high-scoring games.
With advances stats, defense can be the difference between winning and losing, and the Nats outfield should be a difference maker and a strength of the team. Crews will be on a Rookie of the Year campaign that has him as the frontrunner in Vegas right now. Young needs to improve his bat, and Wood must improve his defense. This team will go as far as the pitching takes this team, and this newly configured outfield will help their teammates on the mound.
Once we have some 2025 projections from FanGraphs, we can revisit the numbers.
