Dylan Crews is starting to give the Nationals exactly the kind of progress they were waiting for.
After a rough opening stretch, Crews has begun to settle in since returning to Washington on May 19. Through his first 25 games this season, he was hitting .189 with a .567 OPS, a line that made the early noise around him plenty loud. But the bigger picture has always been about development, and the numbers since then show that things are moving the right way.
From his 26th game on, Crews has posted a .708 OPS. More recently, the damage has shown up in extra-base hits: of his last seven hits, six have gone for extra bases, including five doubles and one home run. Those five doubles are the most in MLB over that stretch.
The swing itself is still a work in progress, but the shape of the progress is clear. Crews has been making an adjustment toward a more consistent launch angle.
The hard contact has never really been the issue; the key has been turning more of those balls into line drives instead of groundballs. If he can also cut down on chases above the zone, there’s another step waiting there.
That improvement fits with what Washington has been trying to build across the roster. Crews also delivered a walk-off hit in the last homestand, giving the Nationals their only walk-off win of the season. It was the kind of moment that matched the reputation he carried from LSU, where he was known as a superstar who could come through in big spots.
The Nationals’ offensive staff, led by hitting coach Matt Borgschulte, has been central to that broader push. The idea has been straightforward: improve bat speed, get to a better launch angle, and then handle the smaller tweaks from there.
As manager Blake Butera said last week, “There’ll always be new things [to work on], but I think the big rocks in terms of bat speed and launch angle will always be there. Just from what we’ve learned this year, we’ve got a chance to evaluate which guys need more of that.
… Part of our job this year [as coaches] was to really look at who could benefit from these things.”
The results show up across the group of full-year players from 2025. Crews is up 6.3% in OPS, James Wood 11.5%, CJ Abrams 11.2%, Luis Garcia Jr.
24.5%, Keibert Ruiz 29.6, Jacob Young 21.6%, and Brady House 22.5%. Taken together, that works out to an 18.7 percent increase in an unweighted average.
Young offers another clear example of the process. He went to Driveline in Tampa at his own expense and worked with Travis Fitta early in the offseason on bat speed and launch angle.
He opened 2026 hot, then the league adjusted. On May 15, Young’s OPS sat at .569, but since then he has put up a .796 OPS over his last 85 games.
He also has a career-high 10 home runs this season.
Garcia’s path was different, but his year-over-year improvement has been the largest on a net basis. He was traded to the Yankees last month at the trade deadline.
There are still things to clean up. The players will have their offseason evaluations, and the areas that stand out are walks, fewer swings outside the strike zone, and better work with runners in scoring position. But the overarching point is simple enough: this is a team trying to grow through adjustment, and for Crews and several others, the trend line is heading in the right direction.
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