Kyle McCann did not choose catching.
Catching chose him, the way it tends to do in youth baseball, suddenly, out of necessity, because someone else didn’t show up.
He was 12 years old, on a travel team somewhere in Georgia, and the regular catcher was sick. When the coach and the players who would step in, McCann raised his hand.
“Ever since then, I fell in love with it,” he said. “I wanted to catch every day after that.”
What he loved, he said, was the involvement. Other positions offered bursts of action
— a ground ball to the shortstop, a fly ball to center — with long stretches of waiting in between. Behind the plate, there was no waiting. Every pitch was his.
“I was in every pitch of the game,” McCann said. “I wasn’t in the infield or outfield, just hoping a ball would get hit to me. I was calling pitches. I was in every play.”
That instinct — to be in the middle of everything, all the time — has followed McCann through a career that has required a great deal of patience.
Getting to The Show
McCann grew up in Suwanee, Georgia, attended Lambert High School, and went to Georgia Tech, where he spent his first two seasons largely at first base while Joey Bart — the second-overall pick in the 2018 draft — handled the catching duties.
When Bart departed, McCann stepped in and made the most of it, hitting .299 with 23 home runs and 70 RBI in his junior season and earning All-American recognition. The Oakland Athletics took him in the fourth round of the 2019 draft — 134th overall — and signed him for $500,000.
Five years in the Oakland system followed. He hit 17 home runs at Triple-A Las Vegas in 2023, posted an .825 OPS, and earned his way on Oakland’s Opening Day roster in 2024, making his major league debut on March 30 of that year.
He appeared in 54 games, hit .236 with five home runs, and then — as the Athletics began their transition to Sacramento — was released the day before the following season.
“I got released from Oakland the day before the season, didn’t get picked up,” he said.
Finding a way forward
“So I chose to go to Mexico to keep playing,” McCann said.
The league was the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol. His team was the Piratas de Campeche. His first game was in Mexico City, in a stadium holding 30,00 fans, with air horns blaring and an atmosphere unlike anything he had experienced in affiliated ball.
“Everyone’s screaming, air horns — the environment was very, very cool to see,” he said.
He enjoyed it. He learned things about elevation that would prove useful later — that at 7,000 feet above sea level, the ball behaves differently; that hydration matters more than you think; that running hard to first base in thin air will leave you more gassed than expected. Denver sits at roughly 5,280 feet. Mexico City had prepared him for what was coming.
Finding the Rockies — and another injury
It almost didn’t come at all. About a month and a half into the Mexican season, McCann was involved in a collision at first base — a season-ending injury that sent him home to rehab. He spent the rest of 2025 recovering. In early January 2026, his agent reached out to the Colorado Rockies. A minor-league contract was signed by early February. Spring training arrived.
Then, in one of the cruelest twists the sport offers, a cutter came in hard and up, McCann put a check swing on it, and the ball hit his wrist. He walked down to first base, thinking it hurt a little but when he tried to go out and catch, he knew it was more than that.
He didn’t fight Warren Schaeffer when the manager came to remove him from the game.
“Yep,” he told him. “We’re going to go see what this is about.”
An X-ray confirmed a fracture of the ulnar styloid. Six weeks of healing. Two weeks of progression. A week and a half of games. And now, finally, here — with the Albuquerque Isotopes, behind the plate again, doing exactly what he loves.
Enjoying Albuquerque
McCann is 28 years old and has been around long enough to have a philosophy about how he approaches the job. Ask him about working with pitchers, and he talks about reading people — figuring out which ones need encouragement and which ones need a more direct conversation.
“Some pitchers need a little more loving than others,” he said. “Some guys, you kind of got to get in their grill and say, ‘Come on now, lock in right here. We need to do this pitch in this situation.’ It’s really just learning what each guy likes.”
Regarding the ABS challenge system, he has mixed feelings, which he articulates with precision. As a hitter, he loves it — the ability to challenge a called strike and get it overturned is a real advantage. As a catcher, it cuts the other way. Framing has always been part of the craft, a skill catchers develop over the years, and the ABS system limits how much that skill can influence outcomes.
“It kind of hurts us a little bit,” he said, “because now we can’t steal many pitches.”
He doesn’t think it changes the game as dramatically as some have suggested, but he acknowledges the shift.
He also discussed Albuquerque’s pitch-suggestion system — where the dugout calls pitches for the first four batters of opposing lineups, with the catcher and pitcher able to shake off the suggestion. McCann has embraced it.
“They give us a sheet at the beginning of the game — here’s how we’re going to pitch each guy — so we kind of already have an idea of what we’re going to do,” he said. “I trust what they have in the dugout, what they have on hitters. I don’t mind at all.”
Giving a shoutout to Chuck Nazty
There is one more Georgia Tech connection worth mentioning. Charlie Blackmon — the longtime Rockies outfielder, a Tech alum himself — used to come back to the Georgia Tech facility in the offseason to hit and work out. McCann and his teammates would seek him out.
“We’d always go up to him and ask questions, trying to pick his brain, because obviously he had a great career,” McCann said.
It’s a fitting footnote for a player who has spent his entire career collecting lessons wherever he can find them — from Blackmon at Georgia Tech, from the veterans in the Oakland system, from 30,000 fans and 7,000 feet of altitude in Mexico. All of it is in the bank now.
The wrist is healed. He’s back behind the plate, for every pitch, right where he belongs.
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