While Seiya Suzuki’s market with the Seattle Mariners seems genuine, the M’s are more known for the road of reclamation than diamond-shaped pegs in diamond-shaped holes. OF Dylan Crews has been discussed as a “popular name in trade talks” according to multiple reports, including Washington Nationals beat writer Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic. The right-handed hitting 24 year old has above-average range, checking boxes with every consecutive descriptor in this sentence for Seattle’s goals this winter.
Seattle and Washington have well-aligned surpluses and needs, giving these rumors enough heft to consider in greater detail.
Crews is better known than most 79 wRC+ hitters with a .217/.285/.363 line with 225 big league games under their belt. The No. 2 overall pick in 2023 was co-stars with RHP Paul Skenes on a staggeringly dominant Louisiana State University squad which won the College World Series. Raised in the suburbs of Orlando, FL, Crews was considered a shoo-in, high-floor prospect with his mature, high-OBP approach, excellent athleticism, and oodles of contact paired with laser-sharp contact. He debuted in 2024, after starting the year in Double-A Harrisburg and could have easily been the heartbeat of the new era of Nationals baseball.
Instead, he’s seemingly on the block. That’s because his progression at the plate has been what many scouts feared. Here’s what the Baseball Prospectus scouting team had to say for Crews ahead of the 2024 campaign, see if you can spot the harbinger:
The second-overall pick in last year’s Amateur Draft, Crews is viewed by many as the best collegiate position prospect since Adley Rutschman. He already looks like a polished, five-tool player, flashing strong exit velocities with regularity, showing great bat-to-ball skills and excellent strike zone judgment. The glove should play in center field and Crews’ speed should make him a threat on the basepaths. You need to squint to find a weakness in his game, but it’s possible that a propensity to hit the ball on the ground might make his over-the-fence power simply good as opposed to elite. Crews demolished low-minors pitching before finishing the season with a brief stop at Double-A. He has an outside chance of making his major-league debut late this year and should be thrilling fans in the District of Columbia for years to come.
It’s the grounders, stupid. Hard contact on the ground is better than middling contact on the ground, to be sure, but if you’re hitting the ball hard into the dirt you’re sacrificing the extra-base hit potential many players need to thrive in a league where high-level defensive athleticism and size comes more standard each year. This was the concern with Crews, as it has been with many otherwise exceptional talents, including Julio Rodríguez. For the Nats, that had to change.
After disappointing 2024-25 campaigns, Washington made a bit of a statement by sending Crews down to Triple-A Rochester at the end of spring training. The goal there was to work on improving his mechanics and getting the ball into the air more. Working with Rochester hitting coach Shawn O’Malley, under the visitations and guidance of Nats minor league director of hitting C.J. Gillman (who is, you may recall, now the Mariners hitting coach), Crews had the best minor league stretch of his career by expected outcomes, and earned a May call-up back to the bigs.
And yet… the breakout didn’t quite come. While it was his best big league season at age 24, and not injury-hampered by the oblique malady that waylaid his 2025, a .223/.289/.374 line with an 82 wRC+ in 443 PA across 109 games is more fourth outfielder than second coming. You really can read into his line what you want to see, which makes it so tough to evaluate what Washington might want for him, though they’ve seemed to invest in James Wood, Daylon Lile, and Jacob Young as their trio of primary outfielders.
Do you buy Crews as the slugger in the clip below, who chopped his groundball rate by over 10% from the year before and remained within the navigational beacons at a 24.2% strikeout rate? Might we see a leap forward since he undershot his xwOBA by over 20 points, put up strong barrel and hard hit rates, and spent much of this year still getting used to mechanical adjustments? And is his above-average in-zone contact rate enough to draw a contrast between him and the inevitable Jarred Kelenic concerns?
Or do you see the pedestrian walk rates since turning pro and fear the balanced profile that made Crews such a dynamic threat is simply not cut out for big league ball. Kelenic concerns may not derive from his contact rates per se, but the fact that he’s done nearly all his damage thus far on fastballs. Perhaps you like his lefty-mashing ways, but don’t want to see Seattle pay a premium for essentially a weak-side platoon bat.
If Crews were a Mariner already, it’d be enough to sell me on at least another part-time role. But acquiring him would require moving one of their starting pitchers, almost certainly. It would likely cost Bryce Miller or Emerson Hancock to make the move, working in part off what our sister site Federal Baseball put together as value options for some potential trades. Getting a will-be-25 year old who won’t reach arbitration until at least 2028, with a peerless pedigree and a floor as a solid defensive outfielder who can cover every position and spell Brendan Donovan or Lazaro Montes is highly appealing.
But is he worth Seattle’s time to acquire? I am on the fence. If you see Crews as taking somewhat incremental strides forward the way hitters often do, I’m still hesitant. Baseball Prospectus sees Crews more favorably, having him as a league-average hitter by their Deserved Runs Created+ metric, accounting for his batted ball profile beyond just his results. That makes him already a big league regular, given good foot speed and glovework, with the upside for genuine excellence that’s rarely available at this age.
In a season Seattle might not get tons of time to acclimate due to the owners planned lockout, acquiring a corner outfielder who is already well-known by part of the coaching staff is an added edge. But wow, Crews has to hit, and in a season at long last likely make or break for Jerry Dipoto, it’s a big leap to put perhaps your primary upgrade of the season on a guy who’s next big year in the pros will be his first.
