Former big league outfielder Andrew Stevenson has signed with the KT Wiz of the KBO league, as noted by Jee-Ho Yoo of Yonhap News. Stevenson will make $200K for the remainder of the 2025 season.
Stevenson, 31, was a second-round pick by the Nationals back in 2015. He made his big league debut during the 2017 season and served as an up-and-down fill-in outfielder for the club for several years. From 2017 to 2020, Stevenson appeared in 139 MLB games and slashed .266/.348/.389 with a wRC+ of 96. He struck out at an elevated 27.5% clip, but walked 10.2% of the time as well with 17 extra-base hits in 236 plate appearances. That decent bat, in conjunction with Stevenson’s ability to play all three outfield spots, made him a perfectly solid bench contributor for the Nationals over the years.
He took on a larger role during the 2021 season, but his numbers took a substantial step back when he did so. Across 109 games and 213 plate appearances that year, Stevenson hit a paltry .229/.294/.339 with a wRC+ of just 70. While he slugged a career-high five homers, his overall power numbers dropped. What’s worse, his strikeout rate ticked up to 28.6% while is walk rate plummeted to just 6.1%. Stevenson’s expected numbers were slightly better than his actual production that year, but he was still clearly a below-average bat overall. He remained with the Nats headed into the 2022 season but was outrighted to the minor leagues early in the year and spent the entire season at Triple-A before electing free agency that November.
Since then, Stevenson has caught on with the Twins, for whom he made a 25-game cameo in 2023 to lackluster results, and then headed overseas to play for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Japan’s NPB. His time with the Fighters generally went quite poorly, however, and he returned to North America in 2025. He’s split the 2025 campaign between the Mexican League’s Piratas de Campeche and the Triple-A affiliate of the Rays in Durham while posting excellent numbers for both clubs.
Those numbers clearly seem to have gotten the attention of the Wiz in South Korea. He’ll now head overseas once again in hopes of following in the footsteps of former big leaguers who made names for themselves in the KBO league like Matt Davidson and Guillermo Heredia. The KBO places strict limits on the number of foreign-born players a team can roster, making those handful of available roster spots fairly competitive. Former Pirates prospect (and son of longtime Expos reliever Mel Rojas) Mel Rojas Jr. was released from the Wiz’s roster in order to make room for the addition of Stevenson. Rojas is a former KBO league MVP, but has struggled somewhat in his age-35 campaign with a pedestrian .239/.333/.426 slash line.
RIP Wiz Daddy Rojas