There are minor league signings that are pure organizational filler, and then there are the ones that quietly tell you the San Diego Padres are trying to buy themselves options. Blake Hunt coming back to San Diego feels like the second kind, a reunion that’s easy to miss in the transaction log, but oddly meaningful when you trace the path that got him here.
Hunt, now 27, was a second-round pick by the Padres in 2017, developed in the system, and then shipped out as part of the Blake Snell trade during the 2020-21 offseason. Since then, his career has looked like a case study in modern roster math: he’s good enough to keep showing up on radars, but he kept landing in organizations where the big-league catching picture was either crowded, impatient, or both.