Double-A Eastern League remains stocked with baseball’s top prospects
HARRISBURG, Pa. – Perhaps it was Harrisburg Senators manager and former longtime big-leaguer Delino DeShields who said it best when taking a look at his outfield.
“Iron sharpens iron,” he said. “Competition is a good thing. To have a surplus of good players in an organization, that’s a good problem to have.”
With that said, the Washington Nationals certainly have a “problem.”
Even with the Somerset Patriots having helped graduate Everson Pereira, Austin Wells and Jasson Dominguez to the big leagues with the Yankees, the Double-A Eastern League remains loaded with some of the game’s top prospects, including what’s unfolding every night about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from TD Bank Ballpark at FNB Field in Harrisburg.
While much of that prospect focus has centered around what’s going on with the Binghamton Rumble Ponies – Drew Gilbert, Luisangel Acuna and Blade Tidwell were the subject of plenty of media attention when they came through Bridgewater and have since been joined by top catching prospect Kevin Parada – it’s the Senators that look like a completely different team since their Opening Week visit to town in early April.
Harrisburg’s roster now features the Nationals four top prospects according to Baseball America, with shortstop Brady House perhaps a bit overshadowed by just-drafted Dylan Crews (1), James Wood (2) and Robert Hassell (4) making up what some believe will be the entirety of the outfield of the future in the nation’s capital.
Dylan Crews
Additionally, Crews and Wood are both consensus top-10 prospects in the game, with the former LSU star, who just went No. 2 overall in the 2023 MLB Draft, ranked third by Baseball America and fourth by MLB Pipeline, while Wood is ranked seventh by each publication.
That Crews is in Double-A already is a story in itself, as he seemingly just wrapped up one of the greatest collegiate careers in recent memory, winning the Golden Spikes Award as the top amateur player in the country and finishing it off by helping the Tigers win a National Championship. He’s since played with the Nationals Florida Complex League team and their low-A affiliate in Fredericksburg before skipping High-A Wilmington entirely to join Wood and Hassell. Despite such a whirlwind summer, the 21-year-old, who has a .929 OPS between those three stops, says he feels “great.”
“It’s a grind every single day for sure, but you kind of learn how to maintain your energy every day,” Crews said. “Especially now in pro ball, you learn how to recover a lot better. Honestly, I feel a lot better now than I did was in college, just because it’s strictly baseball. There’s a ton of sleep that goes into baseball every single day, and in college, there’s so many other things you have to balance with school, workouts, practices. So, I feel better now, for sure.”
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The discrepancy on where Crews is ranked on both of those prospect lists comes down to where each has former LSU teammate Paul Skenes on their boards. Skenes, who was taken No. 1 overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Crews are flip-flopped on each list, and Crews made sure to credit the hard-throwing starting pitcher for being able to stay focused during the college season despite nearly constant daily draft rumors on who would go where.
“It was pretty easy, honestly, because I was surrounded by great players who were present every single day,” Crews said. “Me and Paul, obviously we had very outstanding potential in the future for the draft, and he helped me out. He was always focused on his craft every single day, and that really pushed me to be present every single day, and to work on my craft every single day. I thank him for that, he’s a great person, a great teammate. And not just him, but everybody else. We all knew this was our last time together, and we all went out there and just worked on our craft every day, did a bunch of team-building stuff and it worked out in the end.”
There’s even been some talk, especially with the Angels having already promoted this year’s No. 11 overall pick, Nolan Schanuel, to the big leagues, that Crews could be on the radar to get there himself before season’s end.
“Even at the big-league level, there’s still growth to take place,” DeShields said. “Just because you get to the major leagues, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be an All-Star or an MVP overnight, it doesn’t happen like that. So, there’s still a lot of growth to be had. I think in a lot of phases of the game, we have a few guys that could go to the big leagues and play. So, no, it wouldn’t be out of the question.”
Although he’s typically a center fielder, Crews has seen some time in right field recently, sharing both spots with Wood, who along with Hassell, were the key returns in last year’s blockbuster trade-deadline deal with the San Diego Padres that sent Juan Soto out of town.
James Wood
Wood, the son of former college basketball player Kenny Wood, is a dynamic athlete at what he says is somewhere between 6-foot-6 and 6-foot-7 and 240 pounds, whose long, but projectable frame made him a steal with the 62nd overall pick by the Padres back in 2021.
Somewhat under the radar at the time, he skyrocketed up prospect lists by showing five above-average tools in-game – notably he’s a plus runner and shows easy plus power – but says he’s tried to stay focused on the task at hand and not on who has him ranked where.
“I’m sure it affects me, but I don’t really look too far into it, really,” Wood said. “I feel like the plan in the minor leagues is kind of to just really learn yourself and get yourself prepared so you can get off those prospect lists as soon as possible. So, that’s really how I go about it.” Leaving the Padres organization was “definitely tough,” Wood says, but he’s quickly learned to relish what seems to be a potentially quicker path to the big leagues with the Nationals.
“When you get drafted by a team, you don’t really expect to be out of there within a year, you expect to come up with the team and all that stuff,” he said. “I think once I got over here, I was a lot closer to home. Being with the Nationals and being able to see a lot of the opportunity that’s here, I’m just really excited for that.”
DeShields says Wood has a little bit of Darryl Strawberry and a little bit of Devon White in him, comparing him to two long-time, premium athletes who had lengthy and successful major-league careers.
Robert Hassell
Hassell, of course, is looking to follow in their footsteps as well, but has had to take somewhat of a different path, even as the eighth overall pick in the draft by San Diego in 2021. With a slightly smaller 6-foot-1, 195-pound frame, the 22-year-old Franklin, Tennessee native has relied on elite bat-to-ball skills to move up the ladder.
“As I got a little bit older, I still wasn’t the biggest guy out there, and I was lucky to play with some really good guys that I could see hit the ball a mile, and I realized that wasn’t me at the time and still isn’t me now,” Hassell said. “I need to be the guy that’s consistent. I trust my legs, I know I’m fast, so I know as long as I’m on base somewhere, I can put a lot of pressure on the other team. So, I just learned over the course man, I hate striking out as much as anybody else, and this year the Ks are up a little bit, but we’re working on that. The whole thing is just putting the bat on the ball. When I’m at my best, I’m doing that well.”
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It’s been somewhat of a disappointing year at the plate for Hassell, who is hitting just .216 in his first 92 games with Harrisburg, but even with the infusion of Crews and fellow highly regarded outfielders in the organization like Wood, Daylen Lile, Elijah Green, Christhian Vaquero and even Jeremy de la Rosa, he isn’t pressing to do too much, too soon, and is instead staying focused on learning from those around him. After all, iron sharpens iron.
“I think for me personally, it’s great having a guy like (Dylan) Crews, especially right now and ‘Woody’ (James Wood) beside me in the outfield,” Hassell said. “I feel like we can learn a lot from each other, and we’ve already talked a bunch just about little stuff. It’s going to make us all better players as we go forward, and that’s what we all talk about. I feel like we have really good confidence in us three out there now; Jacob Young was just here in Double-A, and he has 130 hits on the year, and that got him to Triple-A, and there’s other dudes in Triple-A and then the big leaguers. It’s stacked.”
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Washington Nationals prospects: Double-A Harrisburg loaded with talent
