Can the Cubs help Patrick Wisdom cut down on his strikeouts?

In a Chicago Cubs season filled with disappointment, Patrick Wisdom was one of the few bright spots. As previously reported here, among his other impressive achievements Wisdom broke the Cubs rookie record for homers and slugged a bolshy .518. His Statcast profile has red all over it, and that’s good news. Exit velocity, hard hit rate, barrel percentage – you name it, he crushed it.

And far from being a lead-footed corner man, Wisdom is a stellar defender, checking in in the 82nd percentile in Outs Above Average.  He has a cannon. He can even do it barehanded. To quote the man himself, he had a “friggin’ cool” season.

But there is at least one monster lurking beneath the bed: Wisdom’s ghastly strikeout rate. In his budding big league career he has whiffed in an eye-watering 40.4 percent of plate appearances. That would have easily led the majors had Wisdom had enough plate appearances;  Joey Gallo led all qualifiers with 34.6 percent.

We live in the Whiffocene Era; strikeouts have never been more common. That said, since 1920 no player has been able to long survive with a career strikeout rate of 40 percent or more. Keon Broxton carved out a marginal existence at 38.6 percent. Gallo has had real success at 36.4 percent. If Wisdom is to keep his lineup spot, he’s going to need to miss fewer pitches.

So Wisdom has a howitzer bat, a howitzer arm, and a strike zone the size of Waukegan … say, does that sound like anyone we know? Yes, there are some parallels here. Like Wisdom, Javier Baez began his career with a strikeout rate over 40 percent. That was in 2014; he would open the 2015 season in Iowa. There, he learned. When he returned in that season’s September call-ups, he had significantly improved his approach.

Offspeed and breaking pitches, especially those outside the zone, mystified Baez in 2014; he had chase-and-miss rates of over 70 percent on those pitches. On a probably related note, he pulled the ball just about half the time, well over the major league average. All of that changed in 2015. His chase-and-miss rates fell to 66.7 percent for offspeed pitches and just 50 percent for breaking balls. This is roughly where they have remained. This helped bring his strikeout rate down to 30 percent; still high, but not career-ending. His pull rate dropped to 36.5 percent and has never again approached 50.

No one will ever confuse Baez with the pre-grip-and-rip version of Joey Votto. But he brings enough other positives to his game, both offensively and defensively, that teams can live with some flailing.

Wisdom is not the next incarnation of Baez, but there are enough similarities to believe that Wisdom might be able to follow Baez’s path out of the contact wilderness. Wisdom’s 2021 chase-and-miss and pull rates are similar to Baez’s 2014 season. A focus on pulling the ball less and reducing his non-fastball chase-and-miss rates from appalling to merely unsettling could secure Wisdom’s place in the lineup for some time. Every hitter’s mechanics differ, but the Cubs actually have helped a hitter solve this problem once; perhaps they can do it again.

Chicago Cubs: Will Patrick Wisdom’s age prove to be another hurdle?

However, now we’re entering the Here Be Dragons part of the map. Life may begin at 30, but baseball careers begin to end then. Baez was 21 when he went through his annus horribilis at the plate. Wisdom will be 30 next assuming-there-is-a season. His vision and reflexes may already be declining. Wisdom has played in 149 games, and is 15th all-time in strikeouts on the list of such players. Some of them went on to have solid careers, some did not, and for some it’s too soon to tell. But none were as old as Wisdom (29) by game149.

On the other hand, it’s better be a 30-year-old major leaguer today than it was in 2014. Training methods, dietary regimens and swing mechanics monitoring are all eight years better. And improving Patrick Wisdom isn’t simply of interest to him and the Cubs. Triple-A teams around the majors probably have a number of guys like him: older players with real talent but one or two manifest flaws.

There is metal in that ore, and a team that can extract it efficiently will have a competitive advantage. If this guy can turn the corner, there may be more than one front office looking to Wisdom for guidance.