For a team so accustomed to competing at the very top level, it’s easier for the worst of times to stand out more than the best of times. No offense, but if you ask a Colorado Rockies, it’s probably not hard to bring to mind an example of a player who earned a starting role despite underwhelming production. With the Yankees, and with most regularly contending teams, those kind of instances stand out. All of this is a way to introduce the next player in our Birthday of the Day series, who’s likely best remembered as being a particularly underwhelming starter for this team once upon a time.
Christopher David Stewart
Born: February 19, 1982 (Fontana, CA)
Yankees Tenure: 2008 and 2012-13
A 12-year veteran in the big leagues, Stewart spent the majority of his career in a backup role, floating around between teams wherever there was a need as a defensive specialist—especially lauded for his framing, even if not all aspects of his defensive work quite lived up to the expectation of a glove-first player. For one particular campaign, though, Stewart was the primary starter, even if not a full-time starter, and it came under a very unflattering set of circumstances, filling in as the Yankees’ primary backstop back in 2013. But before we get to that, let’s run through Stewart’s career from the beginning.
Stewart started his path with a year of raking in community college in Riverside before being selected by the White Sox in the 12th round of the 2001 MLB Draft. Initially assigned to Rookie ball, Stewart progressed through the minors with Chicago for five seasons until his first cup of coffee in the majors in 2006—his time in the bigs that year was minimal, with only a little over a handful of plate appearances off the bench.
At the end of the 2006 season, Stewart experienced what would be the first of many moves in his big league career—he was traded from the White Sox to the Rangers, where he spent the entirety of the 2007 campaign, mostly in Triple-A, before getting released for the first time. The Yankees took a shot at him, and over a two-month period, he featured in all of one game in the bigs—starting behind the plate in late-April against the Detroit Tigers, a 6-4 loss with the veteran Kenny Rogers outdueling Phil Hughes in Yankee Stadium. In Triple-A, Stewart was a steady presence, maintaining his low .700 OPS.
Stewart’s first prolonged exposure to the big league level came in 2011. Then, with the San Francisco Giants, he was one of the players who had to step in to cover for Buster Posey, whose horrific injury helped lead to changes in the rules forbidding home plate collisions. Although his offensive numbers were pretty poor even for a glove-first catcher, Stewart did enough behind the dish to lead the Yankees to take a second crack at him. Right at the start of the 2012 campaign, the Yankees sent George Kontos to the Giants, a reliever who would become an important part of the Giants’ bullpen for several years.
It was perceived as at least a somewhat-curious choice at the time because it seemed like the Yankees had a fine backup to Russell Martin already in the 26-year-old Francisco Cervelli, who had appeared in 178 games from them across the previous three seasons. But while New York liked Cervelli, they believed even more in Stewart’s pitch-framing ability and wanted the depth, so the former went down to Triple-A. In 55 games for the 2012 Yanks, Stewart accumulated 1.7 fWAR despite a paltry 65 wRC+ — the same as his 2011 with the Giants, but if nothing else, drastically improving his batting average from .204 to .241. Then came his most important season as a big leaguer in 2013.
The year before 2013, the Yankees had Martin as their starting catcher, and the year after 2013, Brian McCann was one of the team’s biggest offseason signings to fill in that role. While neither of these players were their best selves during their time with the Yankees, they belonged in a completely different category than Stewart. The journeyman backstop found himself thrust into the starting role for the Yankees by way of need, if not desperation, for a Yankee team that was struggling to retool while also still trying to contend.
Even if he wasn’t vintage Yogi Berra and was about to turn 30, it was somewhat odd to see the Yankees let Martin walk in free agency without making much of an effort to retain him since he only settled for a two-year, $17 million deal with the Pirates. But that’s what happened, and they set up a battle between the defensively-minded Stewart and the still-well-thought-of Cervelli for the starting role. Both were career backups to that point, vying for the No. 1 spot.
Cervelli won the job for Opening Day and played well in April until his season came to what would be an abrupt end on April 26th, when he broke his hand on a foul tip. He never returned in 2013, as he suffered an elbow injury during his rehab and then got suspended amid the Biogenesis investigation that more famously ensnared Alex Rodriguez. So that meant the Yankees had little choice but to go with Stewart with another no-hit, defense-first option backing him up in rookie Austin Romine.
On the general topic of catcher defense, it’s much better quantified now than it was back in 2013. So while we can look back now and see that Stewart had 2.4 fWAR in 109 games—an honestly adequate personal outcome considering the shaky circumstances—it sure didn’t feel that way at the time. The fact that his hitting somehow got worse from 2012 only made matters more frustrating, as he hit a paltry .211/.293/.272 with a 59 wRC+, a dramatic change for fans who for years had grown accustomed to Jorge Posada’s switch-hit excellence and saw Martin belt 39 homers across the prior two seasons. (As the Yankees struggled, Martin helped the 2013 Pirates snap a 21-year playoff drought.) Even on defense, it didn’t help that Stewart’s 12 passed balls were second-most in all of baseball.
There was also the time that Stewart struck out on just two strikes. Really.
The Yankees themselves deserved the most blame in hindsight for getting too cute at such an important position for the benefit of trying to save Hal Steinbrenner a few bucks. Stewart was unfortunately just the man who had to wear it in front of the fans all year. By September, fans wanted someone, anyone — be it the backup Romine, prospect John Ryan Murphy, recent Double-A promotion Gary Sánchez, or maybe the guy hawking Cracker Jacks — to get a shot behind the plate instead.
McCann was signed in November 2013, and all of a sudden, the Yankees had a plethora of options to choose from as his backup, but obviously not enough room for all of them. Stewart didn’t show enough in his extended sample to move ahead of a now-healthy Cervelli on the depth chart. It was time to move on. As such, Stewart was shipped off to Pittsburgh for a player to be named later, where he filled the role as Martin’s and subsequently Cervelli’s backup as well — Cervelli became the Pirates’ starting catcher in 2015 after Martin signed a big contract with the Blue Jays.
Once he lost that backup role with the Pirates, Stewart bounced around a few teams’ minor-league systems, with his final stop coming with the El Paso Chihuahua in 2019, San Diego’s Triple-A squad. Following his release from the Padres organization in July of 2019, Stewart announced his retirement at age-37.
Reading up on the player, Stewart might’ve featured in the bigs at the wrong time—his most praised skill set was framing, one that didn’t receive the same value it currently does, or at the very least, wasn’t as easily measured. Maybe these days, he would’ve gotten a better overall shake despite his shaky bat.
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series here.
