Dylan Crews is back with the Nationals and looking to stay: 'It's very special being here'
WASHINGTON — Dylan Crews had never been so cold on a baseball field.
It was April 1, 2026, the home opener for the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings, and the 2023 No. 2 overall draft pick was clearly struggling with the elements. Crews, a Florida Man who played his college ball in Louisiana, wore a balaclava to shield his neck, chin and ears from the biting chill.
A handful of Crews’ teammates layered hooded sweatshirts beneath their white home jerseys. A thermometer at first pitch claimed 41 degrees, but between the grayscale sky and the relentless breeze shooting off Lake Erie, it surely felt a good deal colder. Most of the 2,000 or so fans in attendance were wrapped in parkas, bundled under blankets, enduring rather than enjoying.
In other words: This was not the Opening Day of Crews’ childhood dreams.
The one-time future of the Washington Nationals was 300-some miles and a few degrees from where he was supposed to be: in Philadelphia with the big-league club. For a player who always seemed destined for greatness, these surroundings were a wake-up call, a reality check harsher than the southbound wind.
Since debuting to great fanfare in 2024, Crews had slogged his way through two injury-marred, unproductive big-league seasons. The outfielder arrived at spring training 2026 with something to prove to a new front office that owed him very little. But instead of impressing, Crews floundered. He pressed, stressed and abandoned all semblance of an approach. By the end of spring training, a minor-league reset was the only feasible option. The Nats, led by new president of baseball operations Paul Toboni, wanted him to chase less and elevate the ball more. They believed Triple-A was the most reasonable environment for him to work on that.
And so, Crews had to swallow his pride, embrace change and accept help, all to become a new and improved version of himself. Only then, once he had reinvented himself, did the Nats welcome their prodigal son back with open arms.
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On Tuesday, 48 days after that brisk matinee in Rochester, Crews, still just 24, returned to The Show and all that comes with it: the third deck, the lunch spread, the stakes, the winning and the losing. It was an emotional day. Teammates greeted him with bear hugs as he floated about the clubhouse before the game. Crews’ fiancée, Jane, cried when she heard the news of his call-up. Now Dylan is back where he belongs, finished riding buses across entire states and wearing uniforms that honor a local delicacy known as a “garbage plate.”
“Feels good to be back here,” he told reporters before the club’s 9-6 comeback win over the Mets. “You know, we put a lot of hard work into this past couple months, down in Triple-A. ... Makes you realize that it's very special being here.”
But just “being here” was never the goal for Crews, who committed to play at LSU, one of the nation’s top programs, after his freshman year of high school. It was greatness or bust. Crews once told Baseball America that it first dawned on him at age 12 that he could one day be an All-American. As a middle schooler, he spent hours in a vacant warehouse swinging a sledgehammer at a tire. Non-Bryce Harper category, Crews was as well-known as a teenage ballplayer could possibly be. He was destined; stardom felt like a birthright.
The hype only grew across his three seasons in Baton Rouge, a legendary tenure that Crews capped off with a comical .426/.567/.713 line in his junior draft season. Crews, not teammate Paul Skenes, won the Golden Spikes Award in 2023 for the country’s best amateur player. Multiple organizations had Crews ranked above the 2025 NL Cy Young winner entering the 2023 draft.
Upon being taken by Washington with the second pick, Crews shot through the minors like a comet, despite surface-level stats that were more sufficient than exemplary. It didn’t matter; the results would come. Scouts loved the swing. Analysts loved the pedigree. Crews and James Wood would lead the fallen franchise back to glory. Everyone had Crews pegged as a top-10 prospect in the sport entering the 2024 season.
But upon arrival in pro baseball, Crews, for the first time in his life, didn’t perform.
In 2024, he OPS’ed .641 with three homers across 31 games. The following season, he began the year as Washington’s every-day right fielder but hit just .196 through 45 games before going on the IL due to an oblique issue. He wasn’t much better upon returning in August. By season’s end, the sheen had officially worn off. Then Crews flopped in spring training this year, forcing the Nats to send him upstate.
Through it all, team brass shaded the stunning move with big-picture optimism. Toboni stressed that Crews remained a key part of the organization’s future. The Nats believed in him; they knew he’d get it sorted. Manager Blake Butera went a step further.
“When we see ourselves making a playoff push this year, next year, whenever it might be,” the first-year skipper told reporters the day Crews was optioned, “we envision him running in from the outfield in that dogpile.”
Dylan Crews hits a single pic.twitter.com/tqeXLWBgQA
— Kev (@klwoodjr) May 20, 2026
The game’s history is littered with characters who were anointed young, only to be humbled at the highest level. For every Bryce Harper, there are five Jarred Kelenics. As Herb Brooks shouted in the movie “Miracle”:“You don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.” That mantra is true about almost everyone. Confidence by itself cannot win the day. Hard work doesn’t always solve the problem, either. Sometimes a dose of humility — or, at least, a willingness to grapple with one’s own flaws — is the only path to improvement.
That’s what Crews did in Triple-A, or, it seems, that was the most important thing that happened to him while he was braving the cold and repping garbage plates.
“He knew he needed to make some changes,” Red Wings manager Matt LeCroy recently told The Athletic. “That’s the big thing. He evaluated himself correctly.”
Toboni described the plan as a two-way street, with the front office trusting the player and the player trusting the front office. Everybody involved has spoken glowingly about it in retrospect. And over the past few weeks, Crews’ Triple-A batted-ball results meaningfully improved — enough, at least, to warrant a call-up.
On Tuesday, Crews talked repeatedly about embracing the boring parts of the process while he was in Rochester. Over the long haul, he and the Nats believe that mindset, along with his other approach changes, will help him keep things simple and produce positive results at the big-league level. Better outcomes will lead to less pressure, and voilà, Crews will eventually blossom into the player he was always supposed to be.
It certainly helps that the Nats have raked in his absence. The club, currently 24-25, leads MLB in runs. Wood and shortstop CJ Abrams are playing like top-10 MVP candidates. Complementary pieces Luis García Jr., Keibert Ruiz and Daylen Lile have been encouragingly competent. The Nationals, a franchise that hasn’t finished above .500 since winning it all in 2019, are having a great time. That matters.
It also means Crews doesn’t need to shoulder the load. Nobody is relyingon him. His bat doesn’t need to feel like a sledgehammer anymore.
In his first game back Tuesday, Crews went a relatively forgettable 1-for-4 with an infield single. It’s a small sample; no conclusions should be drawn. Mets starter Nolan McLean was a tough matchup. But Butera said Crews looked comfortable.
It will take some time to evaluate this new version of him. He knows that. So do the Nats.
For now, though, Dylan Crews is back where he belongs: In the bigs, under a nice, warm sun.
