Most significant stories of 2023: Nats get Crews with No. 2 pick

We’ve reached the final week of the year, so it’s time to look back at the Nationals’ most significant stories of 2023. We continue the series today with perhaps the most significant player acquisition of 2023: Dylan Crews …

Five times in club history, the Nationals have owned one of the top five picks in the MLB Draft. The first three times they held such a pick, they emerged with some of the most important players in D.C. baseball history: Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, Bryce Harper. The fourth time, they took a shot at a raw-but-gifted athlete whose ultimate fate won’t be known for years: Elijah Green.

And the fifth time? Well, it’ll also be a while until we know the true answer. But based on the early returns, it’s hard not to get immensely excited about Dylan Crews.

“He’s won every award that you can possibly win,” general manager Mike Rizzo said on draft night in July. “He’s been the best player on the best team in the country. And I think when you talk to him and watch him, this is only the beginning.”

The Nationals certainly are banking on that. Crews arrived with as impressive a resume as there was coming out of college: the Golden Spikes Award winner, a national championship at LSU and a jaw-dropping stat line in 71 amateur games this season (.426 batting average, 18 homers, 70 RBIs, .567 on-base percentage, 1.280 OPS).

And while the stats from his first 35 professional games (.292 batting average, five homers, 29 RBIs, .377 on-base percentage, .845 OPS) weren’t as dramatic, they were no less impressive given the fact he played a majority of those games at Double-A Harrisburg against far more experienced competition.

Crews will get his first taste of a big league clubhouse in February when he’s (likely) to secure an invitation to spring training a couple weeks shy of his 22nd birthday. Nobody’s expecting the Nationals to put him on the Opening Day roster, but neither is anybody expecting him to need a typical amount of time in the minors before he’s deemed ready. A midseason call-up is the hope.

Whenever it happens, whether it’s early in the season, late in the season or not until 2025, Crews’ debut should be viewed as significantly as the aforementioned top-five draft picks’ debuts were. Sure, Strasburg and Harper’s debuts were big news well outside the D.C. area, but Crews was considered as good of a position player prospect pre-draft as Harper was back in 2010. If not for his LSU teammate Paul Skenes, he likely would have been the No. 1 pick himself.

That kind of pedigree brings a certain amount of pressure along with it, of course. The spotlight will be on Crews from the moment he arrives, and his ability to deal with it will go a long way toward setting his career on either an upward or downward trajectory.

You won’t be surprised to learn Crews embraces the pressure the same way Harper always did.

“I like to say pressure is a privilege,” he said on draft night. “It’s how you take it. The transition seemed pretty easy as I got to LSU, and I feel like the transition is going to be pretty easy as I go and play for the Nationals.”

He’s only one player, and one player can only make so much difference on a major league baseball team. But he is by all accounts a notch above anybody else in the Nats organization at the moment.

As talented as Green and James Wood and Brady House and CJ Abrams and Cade Cavalli and MacKenzie Gore and Josiah Gray are, none was a top-two pick in the draft.

The Nationals have acquired a lot of talented young players in the last two years. None as important as Dylan Crews.