Andrew Knizner Has Changed Organizations Four Times Since December And Is Now The Giants' Most Experienced Catcher

The last major league inning Andrew Knizner caught was at Oracle Park, on a Saturday in September, against Colorado. He batted twice and did not get a hit. Fifty-five days later the Giants designated him for assignment, and he became a free agent the same day.

Three hundred and eighteen days after that Saturday, on Tuesday, they signed him again.

In between he belonged to Seattle, to Colorado, and to Boston, and he did not play a major league game for any of them.

Two sets of numbers#

A decade of professional baseball has produced two records of Andrew Knizner, and they do not describe the same employee.

The first: 326 major league games, 975 plate appearances, 186 hits, 19 home runs. He has batted .211 with a .281 on-base percentage and a .316 slugging percentage. Those are the numbers that appear next to his name on a broadcast graphic.

The second: 304 games behind the plate, 257 of them starts, 2,286 innings caught, eight passed balls. Eight, across seven seasons and three organizations. In 2024 and 2025 he caught 473 innings and allowed none at all.

He has also pitched. Three times, once for St. Louis in 2022 and twice for Texas in 2024, for a total of three and two-thirds innings, in which he gave up two hits and no earned runs. That is the other thing a catcher like this is for. When a game has gone far enough sideways that a team will not spend another arm on it, somebody has to stand out there, and it is usually the man whose bat nobody is protecting.

Only one of those two records is the job. The other one is what gets printed.

The year, in the order it happened#

Seattle signed him on December 16. On March 24 the Mariners designated him for assignment, and on March 25, which was Opening Day, they released him.

Colorado signed him to a minor league contract on April 1 and sent him to Albuquerque. He went on the injured list there on April 22, retroactive to April 21, and came back on May 13. On June 18, Albuquerque released him.

Boston signed him to a minor league contract on June 23 and sent him to Worcester. He caught there through the first week of August. His last game for Worcester was August 4, and he went 2 for 5. On August 7 the club let him go, which MLB Trade Rumors reported was Knizner exercising an opt-out clause rather than a decision made about him.

Four days later he was a San Francisco Giant.

Under all of that, he was hitting. Across the two Triple-A clubs this season he batted .294 with a .393 on-base percentage and a .552 slugging percentage in 234 plate appearances, .279 in the thin air at Albuquerque and .316 at Worcester, where the air is ordinary.

It was the second straight summer he did that. In 2025 he hit .382 in 23 games for Rochester, Washington's Triple-A club, and on May 17, with that line on the board, Rochester released him.

What he said in June#

On the morning of Thursday, June 5, 2025, Knizner spoke to reporters in the Giants clubhouse. San Francisco had selected his contract out of Sacramento the day before, and he played that day. Writing it up for NBC Sports Bay Area, Alex Pavlovic noted that since the start of 2024 Knizner had played for Triple-A clubs in four different organizations, plus the Rangers, plus a winter in the Dominican league, and that learning a new pitching staff on no notice had become routine for him.

"I've gotten used to it over the last 12 months or so," Knizner said.

He said it fourteen months ago. Since then he has signed with Seattle, been released by Seattle, signed with Colorado, been released by Colorado, signed with Boston, left Boston, and signed with San Francisco.

That sentence is the closest thing to a statement of position that Andrew Knizner has put on the record about his own working life, and it is not a complaint. It is a man describing a skill. The skill is arriving somewhere on Tuesday and being able to catch a staff he has never caught by Wednesday, and it is worth something, and the only way anyone can tell it is worth something is that he keeps getting hired inside a week.

In the same conversation Patrick Bailey came up. Bailey went to North Carolina State four years behind Knizner, and one of their shared coaches had once teased Knizner about it: we finally have a great defensive catcher coming into the program, Patrick Bailey is the best defensive player in the country. "I laid all the groundwork for him," a smiling Knizner said. "I showed him what not to do at NC State."

Bailey is not here either. The Giants traded him to Cleveland on May 9.

The part that does not print#

Here is why he is in the building.

Daniel Susac fractured his left patella and went on the injured list on Monday. Jesús Rodríguez is on the injured list too. Zach Morgan was selected from Sacramento on Monday and optioned back on Tuesday. That left Drew Cavanaugh, who is 24 and made his major league debut on June 26.

So the Giants needed a second catcher who could work that night, and needed him immediately, and the pool of people who can do that job on no notice is small enough that they went and found a man who had been out of the major leagues for ten months.

The scale of the gap is the whole point. Knizner has caught 2,286 major league innings. Susac has caught 351. Cavanaugh has caught 183 and two thirds. Rodríguez has caught 95. Morgan has caught none. Every other catcher on San Francisco's 40-man roster, added together, has caught 629 innings, and Knizner has caught more than three times that many by himself.

The Giants are not paying him to hit. They have never been paying him to hit. St. Louis drafted him in the seventh round out of NC State in 2016 and he reached the majors on June 2, 2019, and in the seven seasons since, nobody has handed him a starting job for a full year. What he has is 2,286 innings of knowing where to put a glove, eight passed balls, and a phone that rings within four days of his being available.

That is a real trade, and it is not a soft one. It is the trade where the thing you are good at is invisible on the page that follows you around, and the page that follows you around is the one that decides how long you stay.

Wednesday#

On Wednesday morning the Giants had two catchers who could play. One is 24 years old and has been a major leaguer since June 26. The other is 31, has caught more than three times as many major league innings as the rest of the 40-man roster's catchers put together, and had not caught one since September.

San Francisco plays its last regular season game of 2026 on September 27, a year to the day after the last one Andrew Knizner played in.

He is wearing number 19. Houston is at Oracle Park again at 12:45 this afternoon, and he has not been in a game yet.

Knizner's career and season statistics, his game logs, his transaction history from 2016 to the present, his draft record, the Giants' 40-man and active rosters as of August 12, 2026, and the 2026 regular season end date are all from MLB's Stats API, read on August 12, 2026. His last major league appearance was September 27, 2025, at home against Colorado. His 2026 Triple-A slash line of .294/.393/.552 in 234 plate appearances was independently reported by MLB Trade Rumors on August 11, 2026, which also reported that his departure from Boston's organization on August 7 was an opt-out he exercised, where the league's transaction log records it as a release. The quotes are from the Giants clubhouse on the morning of Thursday, June 5, 2025, reported by Alex Pavlovic for NBC Sports Bay Area and published June 6, 2025. The May 9, 2026 trade sending Patrick Bailey to Cleveland is in the league's transaction log; that Jesús Rodríguez's injured list stint is right elbow neuritis is MLB Trade Rumors, August 11, 2026. Nobody from this site was in any of these rooms, and no scene above is reconstructed from anything but the documentary record.