A wrist injury suffered during the 2024 all-star break required surgery and cost Sal Stewart the second half of the season at High-A Daytona.
The Reds moved Stewart up to Double-A Chattanooga to begin this season, and the 21-year-old third baseman responded with his best pro season.
Stewart hit .308 through his first 56 games but had just three home runs. Then, everything began to come together in mid June, and he hit .310 with 17 homers in his final 62 games for Chattanooga and then Triple-A Louisville.
“Early on, I was kind of chasing, then I just had to hone in my zone,” Stewart said. “Once I did that, they had to come to me, and from there the power took off.”
Through the first two months of the season, Stewart made plenty of contact, but he wasn’t drawing many walks. As that started to change in June, his power began to show. He carried that into the all-star break, when he represented the Reds at the Futures Game.
Following the Futures Game, the Reds promoted him to Triple-A, where he just kept hitting.
“He’s a student of the game,” Reds senior director of player development Jeremy Farrell said. “As he’s continued to grow and develop, he‘s met the challenges in the minor leagues and you can see that in the numbers.”
Stewart hit .309/.383/.524 with 20 homers and 17 stolen bases in 118 games at two minor league levels. The Reds called him up on Sept. 1 when rosters expanded from 26 players to 28.
He reached the majors three years after the Reds drafted him 32nd overall in 2022 with the first-round compensatory pick they added when Nick Castellanos signed with the Phillies as a free agent.
“It was the quality of at-bats that he continued to take in Double-A and Triple-A that put him on the radar for the big leagues,” Farrell said.