The Minnesota Twins have the luxury of having a pretty deep bullpen. From Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax on the back end of leverage situations to Danny Coulombe and Jorge Alcala at the front end, it's a unit that's deep and filled with pitchers who can fill a variety of roles.
But what if it got...deeper?
Brock Stewart was a revelation for the Twins in 2023. He signed a two-year minor-league deal with the Twins in July of 2022 as he recovered from Tommy John surgery nearly two years earlier.
Stewart made his debut in late April of 2023, and gave the Twins 28 lights-out appearances spanning 27.2 innings. He had a 0.65 ERA and was worth 0.9 fWAR. If you extrapolate that out to 70 innings — a mark 31 relievers reached last season, including Cole Sands and Jax — that comes out to 2.3 fWAR.
Now I understand WAR isn't that granular and not a particularly good measure for relievers, but this is just to provide context.
Here's a list of relievers who were worth at least 2.3 fWAR in 2024:
- Cade Smith (2.7)
- Jax (2.6)
- Mason Miller (2.3)
- Ryan Helsley (2.3)
That's literally it.
Imagine adding another Jax to this bullpen. That's the level of performance Stewart was able to have in fewer than 30 innings in 2023.
Now obviously, there are mitigating factors such as how he'd have pitched in subsequent innings (past results are by no means a guarantee of future success, after all) and the fact that he was far more pedestrian in 2024 (5.17 ERA in 15.2 innings).
But if you simply split the difference, the Twins have gotten a 2.28 ERA in 43.1 innings between the two seasons — worth between 1.0 and 1.5 WAR depending on which side you favor — which again extrapolates out quite favorably to a 70-inning workload.
Now we have to face the fact that Stewart may never get close to that kind of workload. He's already missing time in the regular season, and the Twins aren't liable to ride him hard enough to get 70 innings regardless of how many games are left when he returns.
Stewart has also never pitched more than 34.1 innings in a big-league season at any time of his career. Not when he was a starter with the Dodgers, nothing.
Now there's obviously something to be said about expectations being different across each of those seasons (for innings and that sort of thing), but until he shows the ability to pitch even 40-50 innings, it's hard to even wrap our mind around such a concept.
But even if you temper your enthusiasm for Stewart to something like 25-30 innings, which is probably an 80-85th percentile outcome, he's still got the potential to help the bullpen out quite a bit.
So really, it comes down to Stewart's health, which won't surprise many. This isn't meant to sound demeaning, but the Twins bullpen doesn't really need Stewart as presently constructed.
But they'll take every last pitch and inning they can get for him. And if that's anywhere near 35-40 innings at season's end, they'll no doubt be very happy they did.