MESA, Ariz. - Kenya Huggins walked into the A’s world as a trade-deadline arrival with plenty to learn and one big blind spot: he had no idea who Dave Stewart was.
That part didn’t last long.
Stewart, the A’s Hall of Famer and three-time World Series champion, reached out after Huggins was dealt from the Reds to the A’s at the 2025 Trade Deadline, and what started as a new-organization introduction turned into something much bigger. In the Mesa Solar Sox dugout ahead of an Arizona Fall League game, Huggins smiled as he told the story with Stewart sitting right there beside him.
“I better tell the real truth about this one,” Huggins laughed.
“Hell yeah, the real truth,” Stewart agreed.
Huggins said someone handed him a card and told him it was Dave Stewart’s.
“When you meet this guy, get him to sign it,” is what Huggins said he was told. “I'm like, 'OK, great.'
They fly me out to Arizona … I see Mr. Dave Stewart.
Didn't know who he was. No clue.
I had no idea.”
Their first real connection came when Stewart watched a bullpen session in Arizona and noticed Huggins’ shoes - size 15, Stewart said. From there, the relationship started to grow fast. The 23-year-old now calls Stewart “Uncle Stew,” and Stewart talks about him like family.
Huggins said the bond deepened once he did his homework and realized who was investing in him.
“That's how I met him,” Huggins said. “Then we just started talking every day.
When I did my research on him and talked to him on and at the field, I wanted to take it deeper than that and talk to him outside the field. And ever since then it's just been an everyday story, one day at a time, and it's just been awesome.”
For Stewart, the mentorship came naturally. He said he was simply passing along the kind of guidance he received from past greats when he was a young pitcher, especially as a young Black pitcher trying to find his way.
“I just kind of did what everybody has done for me when I was a young pitcher coming up, a young Black pitcher coming up for sure, and I did what they did for me,” Stewart said. “Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, Don Newcombe. I did for him what they did for me.
“When I walked into Dodgertown in 1976, Don Newcombe was the first person I met, and he told me his responsibility and why it was his responsibility. So everybody ... it's not just Kenya.
It was Dontrelle Willis. It was CC Sabathia.
It was … Hunter Greene. I've kind of been able to touch a lot of the guys just to be a source of information to be able to help to make the path a little bit smoother.”
Huggins, the A’s No. 23 prospect, sees that support as more than a nice bonus. He called it something money couldn’t replace and said Stewart’s presence came at the right time, even if it wasn’t the earliest possible stop on his path.
“It’s more than any gift anyone can give me,” Huggins said. “It's more than the amount of money that someone can receive. The knowledge of just strictly talking to someone who's done it, who looks like me, and who strictly pushes me to be better than who he is, and we all know how his career went.
“To push me to be better than his career, there's nothing else anyone can ask for, like at all. It all happens for a reason. I can always say I wish it came earlier, but everything happens for a reason, right when it's supposed to.”
The timing matters because Huggins’ first full season in the A’s system was a rough one. The organization pushed him aggressively to Double-A, where he finished with a 6.63 ERA.
He did miss bats, posting 10.2 K/9, but his command wavered both in and out of the strike zone. Midland used him as both a starter and reliever, and now he’s working out of the bullpen with Mesa in the AFL.
Stewart has been along for all of it, taking each outing personally in the way only a true mentor can.
“I look at him so much as one of my children now,” Stewart said. “I get frustrated and I know he gets frustrated, and so it’s learning when to temper whatever it is I have to say, and you know, remembering the frustrations that I went through in the Minor Leagues.
“He's got way more talent than I had coming up, and he knows more than I did. His ability at this point is much better than mine, so my expectations of him are really, really high. His successes, I feel absolutely jubilant, and his failures are really, really hard for me as well, and so it's just, you know, separating family because he's family now.”
Huggins, for his part, doesn’t want the softened version. If anything, he wants Stewart to stay on him even harder.
“Honestly, I tell him to be harder on me,” Huggins said. “Don't ever take it easy on me.
Not him. Not this guy.
Anybody else? I could probably take the softness, but not this guy because that's just how I respond.
“I grew up in a situation that hardships were the way that you learned. I had a lot of things against me. Now I'm in this real world where some people, not that they don't want me to succeed, but you know, they kind of need me to fail, so therefore they get in there faster.”
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