A weekend at-bat with a generational talent and MLB's likely No. 1 draft pick (2023)

BATON ROUGE, La. — The gentleman in the wheelchair doesn’t notice the best college baseball player in the country with his hand outstretched. George Wood, a diehard LSU fan with muscular dystrophy, is mid-conversation and doesn’t spot Dylan Crews standing at the net in front of his front-row seat requesting his customary candy. And Crews can’t hit without his Nerds Gummy Clusters.

The bases are about to be loaded on an SEC Friday night matchup between Alabama and No. 1 LSU. Soon the packed Alex Box Stadium crowd will hear Crews’ walk-up song, “Calabria 2008,” and clap over their heads along with the beat. Soon fans in arguably the most college baseball-obsessed city in America, watching the most dominant team, will focus on the most special player in years, because there’s an understanding they’re watching history.

The LSU center fielder has a routine. In the on-deck circle, the 6-foot, 205-pound athlete with flowing brown hair, a light, scraggly beard and a thin mustache spins the bat in circles above his head. He chops the bat with each arm. He rocks back and forth and times his practice swings with the pitcher. But first, Crews needs his Nerds Gummy Clusters. His hands remain extended until he gets Wood’s attention. Finally, Wood sees him, and Crews tosses the fruity goodness into his mouth.

“My buddy George, he gives those to me before every at-bat,” Crews says. “It’s good luck. It’s been working, so …”

Crews falls into an 0-2 count. Just stay inside yourself, he’s thinking, like his dad constantly reminds him. This is the next step of his evolution. Crews has already shown he can hit a ball 450 feet and glide through the outfield for fly balls, but can he avoid chasing bad pitches? He takes a ball. Then another one just outside the zone. Then another, again just out of the zone. He takes ball four, bringing in a run with a walk, one of his Power 5-leading 49 walks in 41 games.

“Nobody knows the zone better than Dylan,” LSU coach Jay Johnson says. “Period.”

It’s clear what’s happening in Baton Rouge, as this baseball prodigy from central Florida reaches heights potentially never seen before as the potential No. 1 MLB Draft pick on July 9. Crews admittedly is not the most talkative guy. Some might call him boring. People around him offer only hyperbolic statements that he’s the best hitter to ever come through LSU, the phenom flirting with the inconceivable .500 batting average who finished this series hitting .486 with 13 home runs, 53 RBIs, an on-base percentage of .633 and a slugging percentage of .851.

The best way to actually grasp Dylan Crews is to watch him up close — or to take a step back and watch the scene around him, the reverential crowds and the fearful pitchers and the coaches who hardly have a word to say to him. It’s to go to Baton Rouge for a weekend SEC series and witness greatness.

“I really hope everyone understands what they’re watching,” Johnson says. “Because it’s not out there, anywhere. And it may never come along again.”

From a distance, he looks exactly like the “Florida Man” he is, growing up in Lake Mary, 20 miles north of Orlando. He rocked a messy mullet for most of his career until recently cutting it down to just a long curl with a headband. He’s chill, somebody who doesn’t talk too often or provide much animation. Not many things upset him, his father, George, says. He speaks in a slow, dragging tone that sounds like a mix between Californian and Southern.

But it’s a hyper-controlled chill, in a baseball obsessive who has learned how to combine a go-with-the-flow demeanor with an explosive talent. The type who wants to fish but also go over data. He’s smart and thoughtful; he was LSU’s representative on the SEC Baseball Community Service Team for the second consecutive year. He is simultaneously unassuming and completely aware how great he is and what it will take to get better.

“You do it differently with him than your other players because his character is phenomenal,” Johnson says. “His self-discipline is phenomenal. His work ethic is phenomenal. I’ve spent zero time talking to Dylan Crews about individual motivation.”

Take, for instance, a Crews batting practice session. He is not launching bombs but instead hitting eerily similar line drives, one after the other. Few go higher than the outfield fence, each one a sharp line drive into the shallow outfield. Robotic but fluid.

He enters his first at-bat in Game 1 against Alabama, and on a 3-2 count he takes strike three on the outside corner. He walks to the dugout before the umpire even makes a decision. He doesn’t react.

So the next at-bat, he adjusts. He swings at an outside fastball and drives it on a line so fast and steady that it never seems to increase in height. It just continues on that linear route and lands inches above the right field wall for a three-run home run. Just like batting practice. 4-0, Tigers.

“The ability to separate balls from strikes, I haven’t seen too many people do that better,” says Johnson, who coached Kris Bryant at San Diego.

It has been, by all accounts, a borderline perfect season. And it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Crews is a nearly perfect baseball prospect. The Athletic’s Keith Law says Crews’ performance this year may go down as one of the greatest offensive seasons in college baseball history. When Crews withdrew his name from the 2020 draft because of a disappointing final high school season, former LSU recruiting coordinator Nolan Cain made it clear that players like Crews normally don’t come to college. Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin, who called Crews the best returning player in the country, said his maturity as a hitter was such that he could get into professional baseball and probably elevate himself.

“It was a dream of mine to come to school,” Crews said. “I felt like I wasn’t going to miss it.”

He was a first-team All-American as a freshman. By midway through his 2022 sophomore season, it was widely understood he’d likely be the first college player chosen in 2023.

If there were a comparison for watching Crews in the sporting world, it might be Lionel Messi. Everything he does between the moments of action is slow and casual. He jogs in an effortless glide. He steps into the batter’s box, relaxed, the bat hanging behind his right shoulder. He practices his breathing techniques. And then it all snaps into action. The swing is violent but swift. It’s instantaneous. His throw is more like a snapping motion, a calm build-up and then a sharp rip of the right arm. Back in Florida, he slammed tires with a sledgehammer and did curls with weights attached to a PVC pipe in warehouses with no air conditioning, the rugged, practical exercises that created these current shocking movements. It’s like Messi conserving energy with the ball and then bursting by an unsuspecting defender.

Before games, with the rest of his teammates, he slowly practices his swing in right field, the full two-handed follow-through as he concentrates. It’s the visualization technique Johnson brought that Crews credits for much of his ability to stay in the moment. Sometimes Johnson will look over to the middle of the dugout and see Crews not talking. He’s concentrating. Visualizing. It reminds Johnson of watching Michael Jordan in “The Last Dance” documentary.

“I’m huge on the mental aspect of the game,” Crews says. “Everybody’s got the talent at the next level. Everybody’s got that ‘it factor’ at the next level. I think the separation is the mentality part and how I can get an advantage on another guy. It has to do with breathing and just slowing the game down.”

He has always been the most talented player on the field. Then, this past offseason, he worked with Johnson on plate discipline. Crews says to imagine seven balls lined up across the plate. Don’t swing at the first and seventh balls. Those are the pitcher’s spots. Focus on the inside five. Make them come to you. Then you add his bat speed, “which allows him to make later decisions,” Johnson says. “You can let balls fall out of the zone and be a little later.”

During Saturday’s game, after yet another Crews walk, third baseman Tommy White drives a single to right field. Crews turns and accelerates. It’s a hard-hit single, so one would imagine the Alabama outfielder could get the ball back in quickly, but by the time the ball reaches the cutoff man, Crews is three strides from third base. Moments later, he rounds third and scores to reduce Alabama’s lead to 7-5 in the sixth inning.

Alex Box Stadium and his LSU teammates erupt. Crews hardly flinches. He just walks back to the dugout.

Down by the first-base-side concession stands on the ground level, there’s a table set up with LSU memorabilia. There’s a signed Joe Burrow jersey and a framed photo of fellow Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. At the center, there are three LSU baseball jerseys on mannequins. One is a Skip Bertman jersey, the Hall of Fame former LSU coach and athletic director who won five College World Series titles at LSU. Next to him is All-Star Houston Astros shortstop Alex Bregman’s signed jersey. Right next to Bregman’s is a gold Dylan Crews jersey.

This is the real estate in which Crews is beginning to live. He is becoming an LSU legend, a once-in-a-generation talent, in the conversation of Burrow, Seimone Augustus or Shaquille O’Neal. Longtime LSU announcer Bill Franques called him the best he’s ever seen. After Crews’ first-ever home run, in February 2021, Bregman called his shot and tweeted that Crews would go first overall in 2023. The next step for Crews is to reach Omaha this year, ending LSU’s rare six-year College World Series drought.

1/1 in 3 years

— Alex Bregman (@ABREG_1) February 21, 2021

For now, though, this No. 1-ranked juggernaut has become appointment viewing. LSU always has the highest attendance numbers in the country, but this year it’s truly packed every night. It’s spring in south Louisiana, which means crawfish boils and festival season. Yet these 11,000 or so LSU fans would rather be here. Shoot, they just make jambalaya in the parking lot and tailgate. Game tickets this March reached $130 for standing room only. “It’s gotten crazy,” Crews jokes. “You can’t really go anywhere. People are always asking for autographs and pictures. I love it, though. It’s the reason I came here.”

This LSU baseball team has been called the most talented collection of players in history, with Crews joined by All-American Air Force transfer pitcher Paul Skenes, ACC Freshman of the Year transfer third baseman Tommy White and star left fielder Tre Morgan. There’s a realistic chance Crews and Skenes go 1-2 in this July’s draft.

And much of what makes this year different is the last chance to see Crews. So Sunday, as Crews launches another solo home run over the right field wall to give LSU a 3-1 lead, he rounds third base, crosses his chest and points to the sky. And the crowd holds its standing ovation a little longer.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of LSU Athletics)