ATLANTA — James Wood didn’t have to wait long before his name was called in the 2021 draft, but to Gerardo Caceres, each team that passed on his hitting pupil made a perilous decision. When the first round came to a close, Caceres, who has worked closely with Wood since high school, called Wood’s dad, Kenny.

“I think 30 organizations made a mistake,” Caceres told Kenny Wood. “All of them. They made a big mistake.”

That mistake is apparent now, although it doesn’t bother those involved.

The Olney, Maryland, native has made all 30 teams wonder why they didn’t leap at the chance to draft the 6-foot-7 slugger when they had the opportunity. But to get here in such a short time — to take Major League Baseball by storm, arriving at the All-Star Game on Monday and competing in the Home Run Derby that night as a 22-year-old — took long hours honing his swing in a nondescript hitting facility in a business park located in a Maryland suburb.

At 80 Scale, a training facility in a quiet part of Gaithersburg, Caceres and Wood crafted a swing that would turn Wood into a star for the Washington Nationals. And this? The 24 home runs, .278 batting average and .915 on-base-plus-slugging percentage during the first half of Wood’s first full season in the majors?

It’s nothing yet.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Caceres said. “People think James Wood is a star. He’s going to be ridiculous in the next three years. Not now. James Wood is 22 years old. He’s going to have a monster year when he’s 25, 26 years old. That’s going to be his best moment. Right now, he’s 22 years old. He’s still a kid.”

Kid or not, Wood was an impressive figure at Truist Park on Monday. The sweet-swinging 6-foot-7 All-Star looms over many of his colleagues. He’s still growing, Caceres said, and — believe it or not — more power, and a more refined approach at the plate are still to come.

“I don’t really know how much it’s sank in yet,” Wood said. “It’s a crazy life, and I’m super fortunate to be in this position.”

Through all of this — the attention, the rapid rise to stardom, the expectations placed on him as a centerpiece of the next generation of Nationals — Wood is much the same as the middle-school-aged kid Caceres first met at a summer camp in Olney. His parents, Paula and Kenny, focus on maintaining the normalcy of their life, no matter how much attention swirls on their youngest child.

As Paula and Kenny Wood and their two daughters walk through team hotels, they’ll recognize faces at every turn. But James Wood is unfazed, so they strive to be, too.

“I think a lot of it is led by him, because he’s so even-keeled and humble, but also because these are his work colleagues, right?” Paula Wood said. “We try to treat it that way. We feel like our most important job is to continue to be his parents and his sisters and not turn into fans or turn into people that are expecting things from him. We want to show up for him the same way we show up for the girls, and the girls want to show up for him the same way they show up for each other. I mean, there’s extra things that come with this, for sure, and all of us have taken those extra things on with gladness, but for the most part, our goal is to not change the fabric of our family.”

Among those extra things: Monday night’s Home Run Derby. Wood will be introduced at Truist Park alongside Cal Raleigh, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Matt Olson and others. He and Junior Caminero are both 22-year-old first-time All-Stars. Neither seems frozen by the moment; in Wood’s case, this could be just another contest with his older sisters at home in Maryland.

“I think different people show it different ways,” Kenny Wood said. “And I think in baseball, the way he shows it is just by going out and performing and not getting too high and not getting too low. But it doesn’t change what’s inside.”

As Caceres thinks back on when Wood “was skinny, a little dude with a swing where he couldn’t really control his body,” this rapid rise is somewhat surprising to him, even. Wood, who attended IMG Academy in Florida his junior and senior years of high school after departing St. John’s in Washington D.C., always had tools — scout speak for enticing attributes such as speed, fielding, power.

There were more questions as to whether Wood could make contact at high enough rates against top-end pitching. Chris Lemonis, the former Mississippi State coach, said that was the biggest holdup for professional teams in what was otherwise a captivating prospect who had committed to play for the Bulldogs.

Everything else, though, was there.

Lemonis began to believe in Wood’s star power when he drove to Hoover, Alabama, to watch him play in a showcase tournament in 2021. Wood rifled a pitch into the right-center gap for a triple.

“I swear, I told our coaches, he took like three steps from first to second,” Lemonis said. “A really, really dynamic player.”

He suspected, then, that Wood wouldn’t become a Bulldog after all. When the San Diego Padres chose him in the second round, it confirmed Wood wouldn’t head to Starkville. But to see this from Wood so soon?

“No way would I be thinking this,” Lemonis said, thinking of a 17-year-old Wood. “There was just swing-and-miss in there at the time, and it’s hard to project big league power, too. In each draft, there might be one high school kid who has it. And this guy, he has so many tools, there’s so much he does. This guy is a superstar in the big leagues for the next decade, right? Special player.”

Developing into that was not by accident, of course. Before Wood got the invite to step to the plate and launch homers during the derby alongside some of the game’s biggest stars, he and Caceres attacked his weaknesses at 80 Scale, that Gaithersburg batting cage.

A hole in Wood’s swing, Caceres said, was the high fastball. He set up tees at a high level and encouraged Wood to slap the ball to left field, the opposite way. Machines firing in either fastballs or off-speed pitches — Wood didn’t know which machine would throw which pitch, thus simulating a game setting — focused on the high fastball and Wood’s ability to adjust on the fly to a pitch breaking lower.

And as Wood grew, his less-dominant left hand gained strength. When Wood was younger, his bat path had a tendency to drop as it entered the zone more than he intended. The leading hand — the bottom right hand — of a lefty swing carries much of the control. But a strong top hand helps maintain the bat’s plane through the swing, so Caceres had Wood swing with his left hand alone on the handle.

“We’ve been working for the last three years on the fastball high, making sure he’s not missing,” Caceres said. And the work shows with Wood’s OPS in high outside and high middle zones: He has produced a 1.200 OPS or higher in those two quadrants, per Statcast.

In the minor leagues, Caceres heard reports that evaluators doubted Wood’s ability to hit left-on-left pitching at the highest level. He took that news right to Wood.

“I’m like, ‘OK, they don’t think you’re going to hit lefties? Let’s prepare this offseason on lefty angles all the time,’” Caceres said.

Because Caceres is a right-handed thrower, he set up his L-screen on the first-base side. The angle at which his pitches entered the zone, from the side rather than straight on, over-exaggerated what Wood sees from left-handers in games.

“Now, when he hits lefties, it’s like another righty for him,” Caceres said. The statistics back up the assertion. Wood finished the first half with a .914 OPS against lefties and righties — perfectly split neutral.

While this might have come together sooner than some imagined, those closest to Wood recognize this as the results of Wood’s dedication. “The work ethic is A-plus,” Caceres said, noting that Wood often asks Caceres to stay longer at the facility than originally planned.

And while the coronavirus pandemic ground much of life to a halt, it didn’t stop Wood. Paula Wood said her son worked out constantly with his sisters. He’d pull Kenny Wood outside to throw pitches for hours. The world stood still; James Wood did not.

“To me, that shows his work ethic,” Paula Wood said. “I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that his even-keeled personality means he doesn’t care or he doesn’t work hard, and nothing can be further from the truth.”

There’s a good reason why James Wood is in Atlanta for the All-Star Game.

It begins with that work ethic and it continues with his deep understanding of his own swing, and how to adjust minor movements. Caceres called him a “doctor” in how he can diagnose the smallest issues by feel alone.

Wood said he learned that skill by “struggling, honestly, and just going through the ups and downs. It teaches you a lot about yourself, and more specifically, your swing.”

Granted, struggles have been few and far between. While Caceres was quick to point out a strikeout rate they’d like to reduce moving forward, Wood is here, in front of the lights, because he’s succeeding at a high level.

“I think the four of us, outside of him, would say this is something we saw happening,” Kenny Wood said. “We just didn’t know the timing of it. We figured that it was always a possibility, and once we saw the development, it’s something we saw was very much possible. So we’re just happy to go along for the ride, showing encouragement, and kind of being there as a sounding board.”

On Monday night, as the Home Run Derby plays on television, Caceres will be watching from Maryland. He couldn’t swing the trip to Atlanta this time, but the absence doesn’t sting much. After all, “I don’t think that’s going to be the only All-Star Game he’s going to make,” he said.

Especially if Caceres has anything to say about it. This is a career year. James Wood is a star, a cornerstone for an organization that is experiencing a major shift in leadership after the firing of its manager and general manager.

But next winter, Wood and Caceres will be back in the cage in Gaithersburg, just as they have been for years.

“I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, OK, you had a great season. Let’s be chilling,’” Caceres said. “Nah. Now let’s see if you can achieve the Triple Crown, try to see if you can keep improving, because at the end of the day, that’s just his first year.”