WASHINGTON — On Monday night, St. Louis Cardinals righty Ryne Stanek threw an eighth-inning fastball that might as well have told James Wood to prove it.

Prove that the first week was a fluke. Prove that, if your issue is pitches on the outside, you can still hammer one inside. Prove that you are the high-leverage threat that you were in 2025.

Down three, Wood proved all that and then some.

“All you can really do is shout at it and hope it stays up,” Wood said after the Washington Nationals’ 9-6 comeback victory over St. Louis.

Wood shouted. It stayed up. Willed by the 114.3 mph with which it left the bat, it apexed just 53 feet above the diamond. That was plenty.

That three-run blast tied the game. Brady House and CJ Abrams followed with homers to sink the Cardinals after Washington’s bullpen nearly caved. Their 6-foot-6 teammate got them going. So surely, that was his best moment from the night, right?

“I think the homer was pretty — or, robbing the homer, was probably my favorite,” Wood said.

S P A C E J A M e S !!!!!!!!!?!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/sgkbHddZGk

— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) April 6, 2026

The former was the expectation. The latter was extra credit.

Playing right field (a position he did not play last year), Wood leapt to the top of the bullpen wall (reaching an apex that other players can not reach) to steal a home run away from Nolan Gorman in the fourth.

“It’s hard to (get the jubilant reaction) out of him sometimes — I think that’s what makes him great,” manager Blake Butera said. “He’s just so even-keeled. But to see him open up like that, even though he said he feels fine, and he, obviously, was going through a bit of a rough stretch — to see him make that playing right field, to see him hit that big home run, see him with the smiles like it, you always feel great seeing that.”

Wood heard it from his standing teammates, the dozen or so men on the other side of the wall who offered high-fives and wouldn’t let the smile leave his face. And from starter Zack Littell, who was the lucky man on the mound when Wood robbed that homer.

“He’s (6-foot-6) … he doesn’t move like that, though,” Littell said. “He doesn’t move like the long, lanky body that he is, which is really cool.”

There were those who did not see it with Wood. Skeptics looked at his base metrics, which said he had a .572 OPS before Monday’s first pitch. His at-bats, though more encouraging than that number, were not infallible. There were pitches down the middle he took, and pitches outside that he did not.

But this is still a 2025 All-Star, and it’s still the first week of April. This is a lesson in patience, in promise and in proportionate responses when the best hitter on the Nationals starts to heat up a bit. Because Wood has started to heat up — making better swings earlier in counts, and hitting the ball harder with unfortunate luck on those swings.

“He’s still so young, we don’t want him just to get labeled as just a hitter,” Butera said. “That’s another reminder for James: You have a chance to be one of the best all-around players in baseball.”

His OPS? Now a more-than-respectable .722.

“I don’t want to say it felt inevitable,” Littell said, “but it was almost not surprising that he gets in there and does something like that.”

And in the late hours of the night, as he became incandescent? Well, those who were surprised at Nationals Park were not in the real estate of the home dugout.

“I always know he’s gonna do something big,” House said. “My mind’s never changed one time. I’ve seen him since before we got drafted. I’ve seen him enough to know that every time he steps up to the plate, it’s dangerous, for sure.”

But robbing a homer and hitting one in the same night?

“No, that was crazy,” House said. “Me and CJ just looked at each other, and we were like, ‘Wow.’”