Former late-blooming Cubs slugger lands a minor-league deal with Seattle

The fan favorite is back after spending a year mashing baseballs in Korea.
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Buried within the big news of the day, Just Baseball's Aram Leighton reported that former Chicago Cubs infielder Patrick Wisdom has signed a minor-league deal with the Seattle Mariners. Wisdom, 34, last played for the Cubs in 2024 and spent 2025 in the KBO where he hit 35 homers with an .856 OPS in 119 games.

It's cool to see him get another potential crack at the bigs. He is a former first-round pick of the Cardinals in 2012 who possesses tremendous power, but is a one-trick pony. While he can put a real hurt on the ball, he has a career .209/.291/.459 hitter with a 36.7 strikeout percentage. It took him until 26 to make his MLB debut with the Cardinals, and he bounced around organizations until he reached the Cubs in 2020. It was when he was called up in 2021 that he got his first sustained stint in the Majors at age 29.

Patrick Wisdom showcased impressive power in his Cubs stint

For what it's worth, for a guy who was a late bloomer (and those tend to fizzle out after a "Linsanity run"), mashing 76 homers while slugging .473 with a .772 OPS and 109 OPS+ in 337 games from 2021-2023 was pretty solid production. In each of those seasons, he hit at least 20 homers. His career-high 28 homers in 2021 helped give Cubs fans something somewhat fun to watch during the teardown season. He hit .303/.370/.742 with nine homers over his first 25 games that year.

His last year was pretty ugly, with just eight homers and a .171/.237/.392 slash, evidence the Cubs held on one year too long, hoping for one more season of light tower power. They milked what they could get from Wisdom, and he had his moments, but his time was up on the North Side.

Can he get back to the Majors again with Seattle? He will have an invite to spring training, so they will give him a legit look. While his home run and RBI production (85) in Korea were very respectable, the strikeouts were still high (142), and he hit just .236. He is what he is as a player, and that will not change at this point in his career. At most, he would be a depth power bat for certain matchups if he were to find his way back to an MLB roster.

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