But for Crews, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2023 draft, baseball is anything but easy. He loves playing every day, but understands the sport is a mental and physical grind, rewarding yet humbling. And as the 22-year-old outfielder — who is expected to start his season in the minors after being reassigned to minor league camp Friday — enters his first full season with the Nationals’ organization, getting to the majors certainly will bring its challenges.
The Nationals have high hopes for Crews, who they believe will join James Wood to form two-thirds of the outfield at Nationals Park in the future. Crews, who ended last year with Class AA Harrisburg, has built a name for himself based on his success. But he’s fueled by his struggles.
“I guess looking from the outside, there’s a lot of success that you see,” Crews said. “But there’s a lot of hardship and hard work that goes into it. It’s a hard game. It’s a very hard game.”
Crews was 3 years old when his grandmother started throwing him batting practice in the backyard of her Florida home. She would throw him baseball after baseball, and he would smack them over the house.
“My grandma [said] to my dad, ‘Well, there’s your baseball player right there,’ ” Crews said. “So at an early age, I was always kind of naturally gifted, I think, with the bat in the hands.”
Crews was better at football, though, and played multiple positions. His dad, George, believes he could have been a Division I football player if he had chosen a different path.
On weekends, Crews would play football in the mornings, then change clothes in the car on the way to baseball tournaments across Florida — sometimes sneaking a nap in if he could. He eventually decided to focus on baseball, but football stayed with him.
“Same thing in baseball, you’re getting beat up every day mentally and sometimes physically,” Crews said. “So you have to get back up on your feet and keep going. So I think that’s why the football mentality translated over to baseball.”
Crews joined a travel ball team, the Orlando Scorpions, the summer after eighth grade. George Crews estimates Dylan probably played 100 games each summer, a schedule that would often leave them on the road for weeks at a time. Crews played with kids his own age and went up a level. He was thrilled at that chance, which eventually led to scholarship offers.
Crews’s freshman year of high school was packed with college visits. He would go to school during the week, travel to a campus on a Friday, spend the weekend there and be back for school by Monday. George Crews remembers how scouts would line up at every game his son played until his sophomore year, when he committed to LSU.
And Dylan Crews reveled in the attention. Scouts and coaches would click their stop watches simultaneously. They would scribble observations on their notepads. They would nod their heads and whisper among themselves after each at-bat.
“At a young age, it’s natural to almost get nervous about those things,” Crews said. “Yeah, there were moments where I was nervous, not going to lie about that … you’ve got to tone it back in. Playing up really helped me do that.”
‘The hardest time in my career’
Crews blossomed into one of the top players in his high school recruiting class by his junior year and garnered some buzz ahead of the 2020 MLB draft. And the summer before his senior year, the invites poured in. USA Baseball events. MLB’s prospect development pipeline event. The East Coast Pro Showcase. The Under Armour all-American Game. Opportunities…
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