MESA, Ariz. — The call that changed Spencer Bivens’ life, the call he had been waiting for about five years, came in the middle of the home stretch.
It was May of this year, a sunny day in the small town of Gastonia, North Carolina, and Bivens was entering his time of year with the independent Atlantic League Honey Hunters. It was the highest point in baseball he had ever played and, he feared, the highest point he had ever reached. The right-hander was already 27 years old, beyond the age at which anyone can be considered a prospect, and just to get that far, he had taken such a long and slow climb that he slightly seemed to climb at all.
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It had started, as far as possible, from the epicenter of baseball. His professional career began in France, where he was paid in money and matches were played only on weekends. After a college career as an officer, going had been the most productive. and the only option I had for him. Since then, he had moved geographically close to the primaries, bouncing off a variety of saves on American independent ball, but his dream of betting on the primary leagues seemed as remote as the other. aspect of the Atlantic.
The 2022 season will be his most productive shot. He weighed 25 pounds more, with the height and muscle definition of an NBA guard, and with a fastball he hit in the mid-90s. It had a ballast that ran and fell and a cursor that swept in the other direction. This, the result of years of working on the sidelines of baseball, as smart as ever. If I couldn’t do it now. . .
Then, that May afternoon, it happened. As his teammates stretched into foul territory, Bivens retreated behind the batting cage frame for minimal privacy. The San Francisco Giants were on the line and wanted to point it out. In spite of everything, he was kidnapped at an affiliated dance. “It was a general euphoria,” Bivens recalls. I started crying almost immediately. “When he hung up, his teammates went crazy. He took a booster in that night’s game. After that, he smiled dizzyingly as he endured a shower of beer.
Six months later, Bivens straddled a mound in Arizona, throwing warm-up shots before throwing a frame at the Fall Stars Games. The event showcases the most productive minor league skill in Arizona’s Fall League, and many of the game’s prodigies are here. Jordan Walker, Zac Veen and Jackson Merrill were first-round picks. Jason Dominguez and Noelvi Marte have earned millions as foreign signatories. And then there’s Bivens, the 28-year-old who started his career in a village outside Paris.
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Possibly an outlier, neither highly recruited nor very well paid and older than the festival for at least part of a decade, however, the 6-foot-5-inch right-hander is one of his peers nonetheless. He posted smart numbers in Low A after joining the Giants, achieving Triple-A at the end of the season. This fall, he posted a 0. 87 ERA in seven relief appearances and retired more than one hitter consistent with the inning. It’s simple to believe it on a mound in the Primary League. It might have sounded ridiculous a year ago, but now it feels very real.
If he succeeds, it will be because he believed in himself when almost no one else did, because he ignored the game each and every time he hinted that he was leaving. Whether it was in France or North Carolina or on an old sofa in your basement. , I was sure I could do wonderful things in baseball. “I’ll wear it when the vision is rarely very visible,” Bivens says. When you see things that others don’t, some may call you gifted. Others will say you lose it.
But now, with a major league jersey on his back and a major league baseball in his hand, Bivens knows that when you bet so much on yourself, one thing matters: whether you were right.
When no one let him play baseball, there was his couch.
Bivens’ journey through the game has been long and tortuous (in a recent interview, an undeniable step-by-step takes him thirteen minutes), but from the beginning, it was when his dream lay on his deathbed. He grew up in State College, Pennsylvania, the home of Penn State, and mostly looked to pitch for the Nittany Lions. A Pennsylvania tattoo, with a star marking his hometown, adorns his left wrist. He had played a year in a junior college, then transferred to Penn State, a tall, lean right-hander who struggled to succeed in 90 mph. He made the team fall for the first time on campus, and then. . . failed a drug test.
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He had quit smoking weed after signing up, he said, but the drug hadn’t cleaned his system. (The NCAA has since raised the threshold for what triggers a positive verification. )the team and, according to him, any chance he had of doing it again. It’s not that he didn’t try. He remained at Penn State for the next two years while undergoing shoulder surgery, hoping for some other chance to make the team. It never happened. Smoking “completely ruined my chances of betting there,” he says. “It’s a remorse I’ll have with me until the day I die. “
So he turned to his couch. Not for convenience, but as a launching partner. His apartment in State College had an unfinished basement, and Bivens discovered an old couch at a gift site. He was coming out of surgery, several years after his doomed Big 10 search, and needed work. Throughout the winter, while students were wrapped in heavy coats and baseball fields were dead and frozen, you may hear thuds emanating from their basement as ball after ball bombards cushions.
It was about the present, but Bivens had to worry about the future. I needed a position to play. Enter Rogers State, a former NAIA program in Oklahoma that had recently moved to Division II. Ideally, the Hillcats needed pitchers. Recommended through a former JUCO teammate (no one on the show saw him pitch, in a user or in a video, according to Rogers State coach Chris Klimas), Bivens secured a spot. “We just brought him in hoping he can take part somewhere,” the coach said. Bivens 23, an age when the best players in school graduated, and still lived at around 90 mph.
But it may just make it spin. Klimas remembers the first venue Bivens launched as Hillcat. The coach attended to his batters in batting practice when he walked to the bullpen. He was about 10 feet away when he met the eyes of his pitching coach, who just nodded. “It’s going to work,” the pitching coach said. In fact, Bivens earned a spot in the rotation, posting an MPA of 4. 17 in his freshman year in 2017 and a 2. 37 mark as a 24-year-old senior. To make the most of its declining eligibility, it only took categories in the spring semester.
After that, he faced a familiar dilemma. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t selected in the draft, but he wasn’t in a position to give up. I needed a position, any position, to get back to play. “away,” Klimas said. He passed by to keep going until someone took off his glove. “But where do you go when the minor leagues don’t need you?How do I start a career in baseball without Major League Baseball’s explicit written consent?
As Bivens’ senior year drew to a close, those questions gnawed at him. Then, just as it became known that no trace of professional ball would be revealed, a former teammate began posting Snapchats from France.
The biggest call Bivens received, the call that made him a professional baseball player, came while driving through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. At the time, the only baseball concert I could find with the Lemont Ducks of the Central County Baseball League at State College. (The club’s Twitter account has 3 followers. ) Bivens was on his way home from a layover in Rogers State when a Frenchman rang the doorbell.
The guy controlled France’s Division I Lions, a team that plays in Savigny-sur-Orge, just 20 minutes of exercise from central Paris. Bivens didn’t know they existed until he opened Snapchat one day in his senior year. and Tim Mansfield had played together in junior college, and Mansfield continued to release updates from France. Each produced a flurry of questions from Bivens. What’s it like there? Mansfield would respond, but with less than encyclopedic details, prompting more questions. “I’m on his back about it,” Bivens says. (Reached by phone, Mansfield agrees. “It definitely exhausted me,” he laughs. )
Baseball in France, Bivens says, is better than you expected. The lists are usually full of expats. (“An Australian boy, a Dominican boy and a Venezuelan boy” is not the beginning of a joke, but a list of Bivens’ roommates. )There are also local French players, who play in Bivens closer and closer to being a Division III Level. Baseball is rarely a big deal in France, with games being played only on weekends, and only generating $500 per month. “But I was surprised,” says Bivens, “to see how much they love the game. “
Their first attack was on Toulouse, a six-hour journey south. It was a March day at 71 degrees and a crowd of two hundred enthusiastic Frenchmen swirled around the stands. time. Some played petanque. Bivens has followed the same relaxed lifestyle away from the park. His favorite pastime was exercising in Paris, where he “sat on the Seine and drank wine. “He learned the city and the language well enough to stop by a local, or at least not stand out as much. If you’re planning a visit, you have some tips to incorporate: “Buy reasonable wine and don’t take a crazy amount of photos. “
Bivens hunting in front of him. He had refreshed his Czech and was only two weeks away from boarding a plane when COVID-19 shut down the world. There would be no baseball season in Prague, or almost anywhere else.
“Damn,” Bivens thought, for the first time, “what am I going to do now?”
Since returning to the United States two years ago, Bivens has traveled Appalachia more than a Prohibition smuggler.
There were the Washington Wild Things in Pennsylvania and the Lexington Legfinishes in Kentucky, either of which were among the few non-MLB groups to play baseball in 2020. (Former Reds star Brandon Phillips drafted him into the latter. )Things freed Bivens up at the start of the 2021 season, a frinish covered a bullpen with the Atlantic League’s West Virginia Power. Bivens drove from Pittsburgh, pitched, returned in his car, and was halfway when the job offer came. Bivens joined El Poder at the beginning of a two-week journey and was transferred to Gastonia on the last day of the trip. He didn’t end up where his car was for a full month.
It was an itinerant lifestyle and showed little sign of progressing upward. At 27 years old and with a GPM of 7. 47 in 3 organizations in 2021, he barely seemed to be in a position to take off. When he returned home, he detected a trace of pity in his friends’ voices. “Are you still playing? It’s great,” they said with a patina of condescension, as if he were a five-year-old boy determined to become a dinosaur veterinarian. On the field, he was surrounded by boys ejected from affiliate ball, many of whom were “very acidic and very salty” from leaving them on the sidewalk. Do this and that,'” he says. I hadn’t even had those experiences. “
If I wanted to have a chance with them, I would have to make some changes. Bivens hooked up with Gastonia with a four-pointed fastball that stood at about 91 mph and didn’t move much. That was all its long and narrow. the frame can just put the baseball. “It looked like he was being beaten and outplayed,” said John Anderson, a former Blue Jays farm worker who played for the Honey Hunters that season. But when Bivens showed up for spring education earlier this year, Anderson and others immediately noticed that he looked absolutely different.
Finally, following the recommendation of his longtime mentor, former Braves farm worker Troy Allen, Bivens added 25 pounds of muscle. He signed up for Tread Athletics, a pitcher progression company that provides online workouts. Allen begged Bivens to pull down his four seams in favor of a ballast that had an unpleasant movement on the side of his arm, and Bivens took a new cursor check of a post he found on social media. He performed in Gastonia this spring sitting in the mid-90s with an unpleasant move.
“He was bad,” says former league pitcher Deck McGuire, who met Bivens this spring with Gastonia, “and I had a hard time realizing he never had an affiliate job. “
After all, to check this box, Bivens didn’t have to wait much longer. Though he heard a likely apocryphal edit of his discovery: San Francisco president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi is a very busy guy with men’s responsibilities, and don’t just watch a tweet with the right-handed pitcher’s pitching measures — the Giants really were on his case. spreadsheet. Bivens was the kind of cheap bet the team deserves to make, says field manager Kyle Haines. In contrast, Bivens presented something that few Indy Ball players can offer: flip-down.
So, that fateful phone call in May, making years and years of scratching and scratching and holding on. Bivens ended the verbal exchange with a yes, then with a question. asked if he could continue to play wrestling,” Haines said. Yes, replied the farm manager. Don’t hurt yourself.
When you’ve ground for so long, it’s hard to know when to stop.
Now, after several chapters in its history, Bivens has reached what many other players would do as a starting line.
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s not likely to fall. For years, he climbed an organizational baseball ladder that older players descended. Being 28 is not an advantage. ” If that’s what he needs to do,” says Rogers State coach Klimas, “he still has no options to pass out and play. “Old draft picks.
But Bivens hasn’t washed up yet. He posted a 2. 70 MPM with Low-A San Jose, and would have similar numbers on two short Triple-A relays if it weren’t for a rough ride. After watching him pitch without interference for two months to get a sense of his strengths and weaknesses, the Giants gave him the same kind of analytical attention they would give any prospect. He softened some places and advanced greatly in his understanding of how to deploy them. “The Triple A representatives gave him confidence,” Haines says. It also increased confidence in us. ” The variety of the Bivens Fall League is a sign of the esteem in which San Francisco holds it. Each team is only allowed to send seven or eight players, and they don’t waste spaces with anyone.
Now he is close, after five years as a professional, he still signed with an agent, but he is determined to push back instead of complacency. “I don’t know how to explain to my friends that nothing has happened. “changed,” he says. I didn’t succeed. ” Their closeness only intensified their resolve. He needs to do it for his parents, who have been by his side. He needs to do it for his grandmother in Virginia, who is battling Parkinson’s disease. He needs to do it for his 13-year-old son, older half-brother, who lives with his father in Japan. They basically talk through FaceTime. ” I need him to see me play,” Bivens said. “I need him to know that you can do anything. “
Bivens believed this, even when few believed it. Now, when he faces his first batter in the Fall Stars Game, it’s less difficult to find that confidence. The first step he took would possibly have shaken the others, but Bivens decided to retreat. The team with two strikeouts and a comfortable ground ball in the second. His fastball is 93 mph. His arm is fresh and he is heading for the sweet shelter. Today, more than any time I can remember, anything is possible.
(Top photo: Shelly Valenzuela/San Jose Giants)