After posting an excellent 125 wRC+ over his first two seasons, James Wood is establishing himself as one of the best hitters in baseball this year. The 23-year-old National is running a 169 wRC+, third best among qualified batters, and he’s on pace for 43 homers, 26 stolen bases, and 7.2 WAR. Everybody knows the parameters of Wood’s game by now. He’s 6-foot-6, extremely choosy at the plate, and so spectacularly powerful that his proclivity for whiffs and groundballs barely holds him back. This year, he’s improved on both fronts, dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his groundball rate and adding nearly four points to his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. It’s huge news – James Wood-huge even – and if he can hold on to even some of those gains, he’s going to live at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a leaderboard where Wood ranks dead last.
If you head over to Baseball Savant’s new ABS challenge leaderboard, you’ll find Wood all the way at the bottom. A big caveat before we get going: The challenge system is very new, and because each player challenges so few times, the sample sizes are very small. Moreover, everyone involved is still adjusting to the system, so the trends we’re seeing now are likely to change. In this article, I’m going to be overreacting to these early numbers. It’s way too soon for big proclamations. However, I don’t think it’s too soon to look for patterns and draw some early conclusions about players who stand out as starkly as Wood does. End of caveat.
Now let’s go to the leaderboard and sort by either Net Overturns or Net Runs. There’s Wood, dead last. According to Statcast’s reckoning, an average batter who saw the same pitches Wood has seen would have made 4.8 more successful challenges and netted their team 1.4 more runs. No player has been worse, and even if you ignore the advanced numbers for a moment, Wood’s record tells you all you need to know. He’s made 13 challenges. He’s won three of them and lost 10. For those of you keeping score at home, that stinks. The average batter has won 47% of their challenges, twice as many as Wood.
Here’s what’s really going to pickle your cabbage. Wood’s teammate CJ Abrams, who is having his own massive season at the plate, is at the very top of the Net Overturns leaderboard. He’s 7-for-7 on challenges. No other player has made so many challenges without getting one wrong, and as a result, Abrams has added 1.1 runs of value, fourth most in baseball. Oh, and you know how Wood is known for his patience at the plate? Abrams is a free swinger who’s never finished better than the 24th percentile in chase rate or the 34th according to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric for selective aggression. Just to reiterate, the guy with terrible plate discipline is the best challenger in baseball, whereas the guy who never chases is the absolute worst. Once again, we don’t know how predictive these numbers will be and it’s too early to make any real judgments. But still, that’s pretty wacky.
Let’s step away from Wood and Abrams for a moment to talk about how those advanced numbers work. Statcast helpfully classifies each pitch as either reasonable or unreasonable to challenge. If a pitch missed the zone, it’s automatically reasonable, but other factors can come into play too. If it does touch the zone, but it’s in a spot (and situation) where the average player would challenge at least 20% of the time, it’s classified as reasonable. The last condition is more specific: If the pitch is within three inches of the zone and an overturn would gain at least 0.3 runs in run expectancy, then it’s reasonable. Let’s look at some unreasonable challenges to get a sense of how that works, shall we? Toronto’s Andrés Giménez can help, as he’s a shocking 0-for-5 on challenges this year. All five were also deemed unreasonable:
How did Giménez end up whiffing so spectacularly on his challenges? For starters, he wasn’t particularly strategic with them. Most came with his team already down a couple runs, and most came very early in the count. Two came with nobody on, and only one came with a runner in scoring position. They weren’t likely to result in big swings in run expectancy, even if he’d been successful. But it’s hard not to notice that these are bad challenges in terms of location – all five pitches are at least halfway in the zone – and reflect on the fact that Giménez possesses a particularly bad batting eye. Aside from the short 2020 season, he’s never finished above the 21st percentile in SEAGER or the 14th percentile in chase rate. He’s a step below even Abrams. It’s too early to say that a player’s plate discipline will inform their challenge decisions; I’m not even sure that will turn out to be true, as Wood and Abrams are making clear. In this case, though, it’s hard to ignore the connection.
So a good challenge, according to Statcast, is one that involves a pitch that isn’t very close to the zone, one that most other players would make, and one that could have a big impact on the game if it’s successful. Knowing this, how is it possible that Wood, who is known for his extremely discerning batting eye, has cost his team more value than Giménez, who has not made a single successful challenge? It starts with strategy.
Wood’s three successful challenges came in an 0-0 count, an 0-1 count, and a 1-0 count. In fact, 11 of his 13 challenges came on either the first, second or third pitch of the plate appearance. Clearly, Wood’s priority is getting ahead in the count, but that makes his challenges worth less in terms of run expectancy than pitches that would overturn a strikeout. Moreover, all three successful challenges came with nobody on base. It would be hard to pick worse pitches in terms of expected run value.
Next comes discretion. Wood is one of the choosiest players in the game, ranking near the bottom of the league in swing rate both inside and outside the zone. But when it comes to challenges, he’s on the other end of the spectrum. He’s made 13 challenges, but based on the pitches he’s seen, Statcast thinks he should have challenged roughly half as many. (Still, Wood’s approach might not necessarily be a bad thing. As Sam Miller recently argued, good hitters like Wood should use challenges freely, as they have the potential to do the most damage.) Clearly, he feels that he knows the strike zone, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is. That’s all well and good if you win your challenges – Davis Schneider has made nearly three times as many challenges as Statcast expected, and because he’s gone 9-for-12, he’s been one of the league’s more valuable helmet tappers – but Wood is challenging the wrong pitches. His 10 lost challenges are tied with Nolan Schanuel for the most in baseball. Statcast classified just 23% of Wood’s challenges as reasonable, whereas the average player’s rate is 66%, nearly three times higher!
So Wood is getting docked a few ways here. His successful challenges haven’t netted him much value, both because they’re relatively obvious and because they aren’t increasing the run expectancy much. Meanwhile, he’s costing his team by wasting valuable challenges in low-leverage spots, and, crucially, on the wrong pitches. Although he’s challenging more than you might expect, he’s still leaving challengeable called strikes on the table. Wood has challenged 14% of reasonable opportunities, below the league average of 19%. He’s had 18 strikes called against him on pitches that missed the zone (not including the three he’s had overturned), tied for 16th most in the league.
Here’s the part I find really fun. These numbers are interesting, and we’ll find out in time how useful they end up being. Right now, though, I think the best way to break things down is by looking at the pitches themselves, which you’ll see below. On the left is the pitch chart of Wood’s challenges. The black circles are unsuccessful challenges and the teal circles are successful challenges. On the right is the heat map of the 18 incorrect called strikes that have gone against Wood. These are pitches that missed the zone, were called strikes anyway, and went unchallenged. We should give Wood some grace here, as some of these pitches likely came in game or count situations where it would have been unwise to challenge, or when the Nationals didn’t have any challenges left, but even so, the way the two maps line up provides a lot of information:
Niether chart shows many pitches above the zone, because the top of Wood’s zone is super-duper high and umpires find it hard to call strikes at that altitude. Likewise, like many tall players, his zone tends to get unfairly extended below his knees. But clearly, Wood is challenging two kinds of pitches: low and in, and high and away. Low and in makes sense because he’s seen so many bad strike calls down there. He’s challenged about half of them, it just turns out to have been the wrong half. But he really can’t abide a close call if it’s middle-up on the outside corner. On the other hand, if you ring him up on a pitch up and in or low and away, he’s unlikely to challenge it. Eleven of his 18 unchallenged called strikes fit into that box. Even this early, he’s got some pretty clear tendencies.
Last year, I noted that Wood is particularly bad against pitches low and away. He likes the ball up and in. That gave pitchers, understandably terrified of throwing him anything over the plate, a valid reason to nibble on the outside corner, and nibble they did. They pounded him low and away at one of the highest rates in the league. Pitchers have strayed from that plan a bit in 2026, but Wood is actually swinging at those pitches less often than ever. The charts above make clear that those pitches really are dead to Wood. He’s gotten several called strikes off the plate low and away, but he’s hardly challenged any pitches in that quadrant of the zone. If I had to guess, I’d say that he just dismisses that pitch out of hand, and he’s so used to getting rung up on called strikes in that quadrant of the zone that he’s unlikely to object to even the most egregious ones.
As for higher in the zone, it seems like it’s reversed. Wood likes the ball inside, and that viewpoint seems to inform his idea of the zone. The outside pitches he doesn’t like look like balls, so he challenges them. But he likes the ball up and in, so those pitches look good to him, even when they’re outside the zone. Obviously, these are just inferences based on 30 or so pitches. But look at the same charts for Abrams:
As I’ve mentioned, Abrams is a particularly free swinger, but the book against him is very clear. Pitchers are pounding him low. The average pitch he sees crosses the plate 2.2 feet above the ground, lower than 79% of the batters in the league. Clearly, he’s gotten to know the bottom of the zone pretty well. Six of his seven challenges came on pitches just beneath the zone. So far at least, if he gets a strike on either edge of the plate, he’s willing to let it slide, but he knows where the bottom is.
I’m anxious to see what happens to ABS challenge numbers over time. How strong will the correlation be between the first and second half of this season? Between this year and next year? How will the trends we’re seeing now shake out once the league gets more comfortable with the challenge system? For now, though, I think it’s fair to start differentiating between knowledge of the strike zone and knowledge of which pitches you can hit. The two are strongly related, of course – and I imagine some players excel at both – but Wood has always provided a good example of their divergence. He doesn’t swing at pitches outside the zone, but he doesn’t swing at all that many pitches inside the zone either. That plan wouldn’t work for everybody, but because pitchers are deathly afraid of throwing him a pitch he can hit, all those takes turn into lots of walks. He’s not looking for a strike as much as he’s looking for a pitch he can crush. His challenges indicate that this mentality also informs his idea of the strike zone. There’s low and outside, where he’s given up all hope, and there’s up and in, where everything looks good. Maybe I’m making too much of random variance, or maybe Wood will get better at choosing the right pitches to challenge. Either way, he’s hitting well enough that nobody is going to mind a few more bad challenges.
* This article was originally published here
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