Andrew Heaney
"Andrew Heaney has spent more than a decade proving that survival, not stardom, is its own kind of skill in professional baseball."
Heaney was a top-ten draft pick — the kind of prospect franchises build rotations around — and yet his career has been defined not by a signature team but by how many different uniforms he has worn since 2014.
In an era when pitching staffs are rebuilt almost annually through trades and one-year deals, Heaney's career is a live example of how a talented arm survives — and keeps getting recruited — well past the point where prospect hype has faded.
Casual fans tend to read a well-traveled pitcher's résumé as a sign of failure to 'stick' somewhere; inside the sport, it more often reads as the opposite — evidence that ten different front offices, across a decade, judged him worth the roster spot.
Heaney was drafted out of a three-year college career at Oklahoma State rather than being scouted and signed as a teenager — in American amateur baseball, a proven college track record against elite competition often carries more weight with scouts than raw high-school potential, the near-opposite of how many of Japan's top prospects are identified and developed years earlier.
The steady churn of transactions that moves a pitcher like Heaney from organization to organization — routine, half-noticed news in an American offseason — represents, from the player's side, repeatedly proving himself employable from scratch each time, with no guarantee of where he'll be pitching, or living, the following spring.
Andrew Heaney is a left-handed pitcher born in Oklahoma City in 1991, selected ninth overall in the 2012 draft out of Oklahoma State University and now pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers in No. 33. His major-league debut came on June 19, 2014, and the years since have made him a case study in the unglamorous, essential work of staying employable in a sport that discards arms quickly.
| Year | Team | G | W–L | ERA | IP | SO | WHIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | — | 27 | 5–10 | 5.52 | 122.1 | 86 | 1.38 |
| 2025 | LAD | 1 | 0–0 | 13.50 | 2.0 | 2 | 2.50 |
| 2025 | PIT | 26 | 5–10 | 5.39 | 120.1 | 84 | 1.36 |
| Career | — | 230 | 56–72 | 4.57 | 1136.2 | 1156 | 1.28 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
Oklahoma State to the Majors
Heaney was born on June 5, 1991, in Oklahoma City, and stands 6-foot-2. He throws and bats left-handed, a combination scouts have always found useful in a pitcher, since it forces right-handed hitters to track the ball on a different plane and gives left-handed hitters fewer clean looks. He was selected ninth overall in the 2012 amateur draft after his college career at Oklahoma State, a program that has produced a steady stream of major-league arms out of the Big 12 conference. He made his major-league debut on June 19, 2014, at 23 years old — a fairly typical timeline for a college-drafted pitcher who moves efficiently through a farm system.
The Long Middle of a Career
What distinguishes Heaney's story from those of his draft classmates is not any single dominant season but its duration. More than a decade after his debut, he is still on a major-league roster, now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, wearing No. 33. Careers like his rarely make highlight reels; they are built instead on a pitcher's ability to adjust — a new pitch mix here, a role change there — enough times, for enough different coaching staffs, to keep getting a phone call each winter. That is its own form of professional literacy, distinct from talent alone: reading what a team needs, and making the case, year after year, that you can still provide it.
In American baseball, being drafted out of a four-year university — as Heaney was, from Oklahoma State — is a distinct developmental path from being signed as a teenager, whether out of a U.S. high school or, internationally, as a 16-year-old amateur free agent from Latin America. College draftees typically enter professional ball older, physically more developed, and with several years of high-level competition already behind them, which is one reason they are often expected to reach the majors faster than high-school picks.
Wearing No. 33 Now
There is no dramatic arc to point to in Heaney's current chapter with the Dodgers — no comeback narrative demanded, no reinvention story required. He is, at this point in his career, simply still pitching, which for a player drafted in the first round more than a decade ago is itself the quieter, harder achievement. What comes next for him will likely be decided the way most of his career has been: one season, one contract, one opportunity to show a new coaching staff what he can still do.
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Andrew Heaney Gear — Official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.