Player review: Spencer Bivens

The feel-good story of the year.

2024 stats: 27 G (2 GS), 48.2 IP, 3.14 ERA, 123 ERA+, 1.192 WHIP, 8.7 H/9, 6.8 K/9, 2.0 BB/9

In 2024, Spencer Bivens threw this sinker in a Major League baseball game.

The fact that the pitch ever took flight tickles the soul, warms the cockles of the coldest of hearts. The pitch’s flight carried the arc of two decades worth of work and hope and dreams and mistakes and frustration and perseverance.

As a 20 year old, Bivens expected to play baseball for his hometown Penn State before a positive drug test for marijuana led to him being kicked off the team and kicked down a divisional peg. That cruel boot sent him careening on a pinball path through Division II no man’s land in Oklahoma, across the ocean to the baseball hotbed of France which led to a deeper European dive into the Czech Republic that was canceled due to a global pandemic, forcing Bivens to relocate stateside where he pitched in independent leagues across four different states before eventually landing in the San Francisco Giants organization in 2022, playing Single-A ball as a 28 year old.

With that many trips around the sun under your belt, it’s hard to justify spending significant time in a cinder block clubhouse solidly situated in the southern sprawl of San Jose. The city might geographically be a whole lot closer to Oracle than the Paris suburb of Savigny-sur-Orge, but the emotional distance can be hard to fathom. A significant climb remained, but at least the peak was visible. Besides Bivens had grown accustomed to taking a kick in the shins in stride. He knew how to wait. He just kept pitching and kept progressing. By the age of 29 he had jumped to Richmond, then to Sacramento, and with less than two weeks shy of his 30th birthday, Bivens got the call to the Majors.

As indirect as that course was to his 1-2 sinker to Zach Neto, Bivens believes the more straightforward course of D-1 to draft to farm to Majors would never have produced the same results. That sinker needed time, it needed some scuff. By the time, Bivens released it out of his hands it had aged into the finest fromage: its arm side ride stanking up the zone, grating in on the hands and breaking down Neto’s swing before popping out of Patrick Bailey’s glove cuz it had so much dang action.

First batter faced in the Majors down on strikes.

Then the next pitch he threw got slapped over the center field wall.

In a way, watching your dreams burst into feathers like a shot duck probably comforted Bivens to a certain degree. It gave him something to respond to, and he responded with 2.2 scoreless, hitless innings and three more Ks, earning Bivens his first win.

In his next appearance, the right-hander managed two scoreless frames after navigating around a lead-off double in the 2nd and a bases-loaded with no outs in the 3rd. Pushing his luck, he took the mound for the 4th and gave up back-to-back homers which dealt him his first loss.

These early knock-downs served as a reminder: Of course, the Majors aren’t the end of the road, they’re just another stretch of highway, a journey themselves. The challenges won’t ever let up.

Over his next ten appearances (18.2 innings), Bivens surrendered just two runs and whittled down his ERA to 1.90. By the end of August, his ERA was at a solid 2.64. He didn’t allow an earned run in 16 of his 27 appearances all season.

On June 30th with a handful innings to his name, Bob Melvin handed Bivens the ball for his first career start. The rotation had been worn through, they needed someone to just eat up some innings in a rubber match that happened to be against, well, LA. Bivens didn’t shrink from the competition. He allowed a run on four hits over five innings. Three strikeouts were totaled—two of them against this Ohtani guy. After the first K — a swing-thru on a high-and-tight fastball that stranded a runner at second — Bivens flexed and let loose a controlled scream. After the second, Bivens unfurled. His 0-2 sweeper darted in on Ohtani’s hands, dodged his swing, and the rookie doubled-over, let out a guttural howl, then spun around and jabbed the air before recovering his nonplussed demeanor on the walk back to the dugout.

The score was 9-1. The lead was comfortable. Sunday afternoon baseball in early summer. The stakes nonexistent. A low-leverage long reliever in a spot start on a floundering team against the best offensive player in the game on a future pennant winner — Bivens’s reaction is laughable on the surface. But we all know his story and understand that the personal stakes in that final at-bat were anything but low.

Feel-good story aside, Bivens role on the 2024 club wasn’t a particularly elevated one.

According to Baseball Reference, he entered a game in a “high leverage” situation only three times, with the majority of his reps coming in the 4th inning or earlier. His work in late innings typically meant the Giants had a substantial lead or faced a substantial deficit. When the game teetered in the balance, Bivens’s performance was checkered. Brought on with two outs and the bases loaded to preserve a 9th inning tie against the White Sox, Bivens couldn’t get out of the jam, leaking a 2-2 sinker out over the heart of the plate to Korey Lee. Four runs later the dismal South Siders snuck out of San Francisco with a win the Giants were desperate for.

The grumbling around Bivens being placed in that situation was fair. He’s not built to shut down rallies (though he did end up bagging his first save in the Giants’ last win of the season), he’s built for length. Better than average control meant he rarely got himself into trouble. The vertical drop on his sinker as well as his sharpish sweeper are designed not to miss bats but dictate contact. His 18.7 Whiff-% was one of the lowest in the league, while his 54 ground ball%, 36.6 hard-hit%, and 5.4 BB% were some of the better rates in the league. Such a profile fit the Giants well, and the role of long reliever, innings-eater fit Bivens well.

The question is can Bivens push his incredible journey even further. He made it to the Majors in 2024, now can he make himself indispensable?

In the last month of the season, he started tinkering with his mix, working to expand his selection from primarily sinker-sweeper to a trio of secondary looks to throw off his mid-90s sink. A cutter jumped in usage from 2% in August to 22% in September to go along with his change-up and sweeper. The pitch acts as a little seed of doubt — a different velocity, a different break to sow discord in the batter’s mind. Expanding his repertoire will help him become more viable consecutive times facing a lineup, though adding arrows to his quiver isn’t a solve for larger issues he faces.

The cruel reality is that most clubs aren’t going to be looking to send a 30/31 year old arm into a game when a younger one could be used and developed. Those low stakes scenarios are ideal for on-hand experience. In September we saw possible Bivens innings go to players like Austin Warren, Landen Roupp, and Trevor McDonald. Then there’s cuspy starters and returners like Mason Black, Tristan Beck, and Keaton Winn who will be fighting for a roster spot. From a narrative standpoint, age is Bivens’s most compelling factor. From the cold objective eye of player development, it’s his biggest hurdle to getting consistent action in 2025. That being said, Bivens has overcome more substantial roadblocks — I wouldn’t write him off yet.