MESA, Ariz. — The call that changed Spencer Bivens’ life, the call he’d been waiting to receive for almost five years, came in the middle of stretch.
It was May of this year, a sunny day in the small North Carolina town of Gastonia, and Bivens was entering his second year with the independent Honey Hunters of the Atlantic League. This was the highest level of baseball he’d ever played and, he feared, the highest level he’d ever reach. The right-hander was already 27, past the age anyone could be considered a prospect, and just to get this far had required a climb so long and gradual, he had barely seemed to ascend at all.
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He’d started about as far from baseball’s epicenter as possible. His professional career began in France, where he was paid in cash and where games are played only on the weekends. After a journeyman collegiate career, going overseas had been the best and only option available to him. Since then, he’d gotten closer to the majors geographically, bouncing around a variety of stops in American independent ball, yet his dream of playing in the big leagues felt just as distant as it did across the Atlantic.
The 2022 season was going to be his best shot. He’d shown up 25 pounds heavier, with the height and wiry muscle definition of an NBA shooting guard, and with a fastball that was hitting the mid-90s. He had a sinker that ran and dived and a slider that swept in the other direction. This, the result of years of grinding on baseball’s fringes, was as good as he’d ever been. If he couldn’t make it now…
Then, that May afternoon, it happened. As his teammates stretched in foul territory, Bivens retreated behind the batting cage shell for a modicum of privacy. The San Francisco Giants were on the line, and they wanted to sign him. He was finally being raptured into affiliated ball. “It was total euphoria,” Bivens recalls. “I started crying damn near immediately.” When he hung up, his teammates went wild. He took a curtain call during that night’s game. After it, he grinned giddily as he endured a beer shower.
Six months later, Bivens stands astride a mound in Arizona, firing warmup pitches before tossing a frame in the Fall Stars Games. The event is the showcase for the best minor-league talent in the Arizona Fall League, and several of the game’s wunderkinds are here. Jordan Walker, Zac Veen and Jackson Merrill were first-round draft picks. Jasson Dominguez and Noelvi Marte earned millions as international signees. And then there’s Bivens, the 28-year-old who began his career in a town outside of Paris.
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He may be an outlier, neither highly drafted nor highly compensated and older than the competition by a half-decade at least, but the 6-foot-5 righty is nonetheless among his peers. He posted strong numbers at Low A after joining the Giants, reaching Triple A by season’s end. This fall, he recorded an 0.87 ERA in seven relief appearances and struck out more than a batter per inning. Clad in Giants gear except for a Scottsdale Scorpions hat, it’s easy to picture him on a major-league mound. That might have seemed ridiculous a year ago, but now it feels very real.
If he makes it, it will be because he believed in himself when almost no one else did, because he ignored the game all the times it hinted that he should walk away. Whether in France or North Carolina or throwing into an old couch in his basement, he was certain he could do big things in baseball. “I’m going to put it in when the vision isn’t even seeable,” Bivens says. When you see things others don’t, some might call you gifted. Others will say you’re losing it.
But now, a big-league jersey on his back and a big-league baseball in his hand, Bivens knows that when you bet that big on yourself, only one thing matters: whether you were right.
When nobody would let him play baseball, there was his couch.
Bivens’ path through the game has been long and winding — in a recent interview, a simple stop-by-stop retracing of it takes him 13 minutes to complete — but then, right at the beginning, is when his dream laid on its deathbed. He’d grown up in State College, Penn., the home of Penn State, and he wanted more than anything to pitch for the Nittany Lions. A tattoo of Pennsylvania, with a star marking his hometown, adorns his left wrist. He’d played a year at a junior college and then transferred into Penn State, a tall and skinny righty who had trouble touching 90 mph. He made the team his first fall on campus and then … failed a drug test.
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He’d stopped smoking weed after enrolling, he says, but the drug apparently hadn’t cleared his system. (The NCAA has since raised the threshold for what triggers a positive test.) The test result cost him his spot on the team and, he feels, any chance he had at making it again. Not that he didn’t try. He remained at Penn State for the next two years, weathering a shoulder surgery in the interim, hoping for another chance at cracking the squad. It never happened. Smoking “totally ruined my chances of playing there,” he says. “It’s a regret I’ll have with me until the day I die.”
So, he turned to his sofa. Not for comfort, but as a throwing partner. His apartment at State College had an unfinished basement, and Bivens found an old couch on a giveaway site. He was coming off surgery, several years into his doomed quest to pitch in the Big 10, and he needed work. All winter, when students were bundled up in heavy coats and baseball fields were frozen over, muffled pops could be heard emanating from his basement as ball after ball pelted the cushions.
That was taking care of the present, but Bivens needed to worry about the future. He needed a place to play. Enter Rogers State, a former NAIA program in Oklahoma that had recently jumped to Division II. Conveniently, the Hillcats needed pitchers. Recommended by a former JUCO teammate — nobody from the program ever watched him pitch, in person or on video, according to Rogers State coach Chris Klimas — Bivens landed a spot. “We just brought him in hoping he could chip in somewhere,” the coach says. Bivens was 23, an age by which most collegiate players have graduated, and still living around 90 mph.
But he could spin it. Klimas remembers the first bullpen Bivens threw as a Hillcat. The coach had been tending to his hitters in batting practice when he wandered toward the bullpen. He was about 10 feet out when he locked eyes with his pitching coach, who just nodded. “That’s going to work,” the pitching coach said. Indeed, Bivens earned a rotation spot, recording a 4.17 ERA his first year in 2017 and a 2.37 mark as a 24-year-old senior. To make the most of his dwindling eligibility, he took classes only in the spring semester.
After that, he faced a familiar dilemma. He’d gone unsurprisingly undrafted, but he wasn’t ready to call it quits. He once again needed a place — any place — to play. “Spencer was not going to be denied,” says Klimas. “He was going to keep going until someone took the glove away from him.” But where do you go when the minor leagues don’t want you? How do you start a baseball career without the express written consent of Major League Baseball?
As Bivens’ senior year drew to a close, those questions ate at him. Then, just when it appeared no avenues into pro ball would reveal themselves, an old teammate began posting Snapchats from France.
The second most important call Bivens ever received, the call that turned him into a professional baseball player, came as he trudged through O’Hare Airport in Chicago. To that point, the only baseball gig he’d been able to find was with the Lemont Ducks of the Centre County Baseball League back home in State College. (The club’s Twitter account has three followers.) Bivens was returning home from a visit to Rogers State when a Frenchman rang.
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The man ran the Lions of the French Division I, a team that plays in Savigny-sur-Orge, just a 20-minute train ride from the center of Paris. Bivens hadn’t realized they existed until he opened Snapchat one day during his senior year. He and Tim Mansfield had played together back in junior college, and Mansfield kept posting updates from France. Each produced a flurry of questions from Bivens. How are you doing that? What’s it like over there? Mansfield would reply, but with something less than encyclopedic detail, prompting more questions. “I was on his ass about it,” Bivens says. (Reached by phone, Mansfield agrees. “He definitely wore my ass out,” he laughs.)
The baseball in France, Bivens says, is better than you’d expect. Rosters are mostly filled with ex-pats. (“An Australian guy, a Dominican guy and a Venezuelan guy” is not the start to a joke, but a list of Bivens’ flatmates.) There are also native French players, who play the game at what Bivens approximates to be a Division III level. Baseball is not big business in France, with games played only on the weekends, and it pays only $500 a month. “But I was shocked,” Bivens says, “by how much they love the game.”
His first game was in Toulouse, a six-hour drive south. It was a 71-degree March day, and a crowd of 200 French fans milled around the bleachers. They grilled and drank beer and smoked cigarettes, watching the game at the same time. Some played bocce ball. Bivens adopted the same laidback lifestyle away from the park. His favorite pastime was to take the train into Paris, where he would “sit by the Seine and drink wine.” He learned the city and the language well enough to pass as a local, or at least to not stick out as much. If you’re planning a visit, he has some tips to blend in: “Buy cheap wine and don’t take a crazy amount of pictures.”
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Bivens posted a 2.51 ERA in about 75 innings with the Lions. For his next step, he looked not west toward home, but deeper into Europe. Leaning on a Facebook community called Baseball Jobs Overseas — the group has more than 3,500 followers — he landed a spot with a Czech club called Kotlářka Praha for the 2020 season. It came with an apartment in Prague, flights in and out and a bigger salary than he’d made in France. It wasn’t a conventional baseball career, but there were worse ways to make a living.
Bivens was looking forward to it. He’d brushed up on his Czech and was just two weeks away from stepping on a plane when COVID-19 shut down the world. There would be no baseball season in Prague, or most anywhere else.
“Damn,” Bivens thought to himself, hardly for the first time, “what am I going to do now?”
Since returning to the U.S. two years ago, Bivens has crisscrossed Appalachia more than a bootlegger during Prohibition.
There were the Washington Wild Things in Pennsylvania and the Lexington Legends in Kentucky, both of whom were among the few non-MLB teams to play baseball at all in 2020. (Former Reds star Brandon Phillips recruited him to the latter.) When the Wild Things released Bivens early in the 2021 season, a friend lined up a bullpen with the West Virginia Power of the Atlantic League. Bivens drove down from Pittsburgh, pitched, got back in his car and was halfway home when the job offer came through. Bivens joined the Power at the start of a two-week road trip and was traded to Gastonia on the last day of it. He didn’t wind up back where his car was for a full month.
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It was an itinerant lifestyle, and one that showed few signs of upward progress. At 27 and with a 7.47 ERA across three organizations in 2021, he hardly seemed poised to take off. When he’d return home, he’d detect a hint of pity in the voices of his friends. “You’re still playing? That’s so cool,” they’d say with a patina of condescension, as if he were a five-year-old determined to become a dinosaur vet. At the field, he was surrounded by guys kicked out of affiliated ball, many of them “very sour and very salty” about being left on the curb. “Nothing but, ‘Ah, it’s so hard to make it back, it’s so hard to do this and that,’” he says. “I hadn’t even had these experiences.”
If he wanted a chance at them, he’d have to make some changes. Bivens joined Gastonia with a four-seam fastball that sat about 91 mph and didn’t move much. That was just about all his long, thin body could put behind the baseball. “He seemed like he was overwhelmed and overmatched,” says John Anderson, a former Blue Jays farmhand who played for the Honey Hunters that season. But when Bivens reported to spring training at the beginning of this year, Anderson and others immediately noticed that he looked completely different.
Finally heeding the advice of his longtime mentor, former Braves farmhand Troy Allen, Bivens had added 25 pounds of muscle. He signed up for Tread Athletics, a pitching development company that offers training online. Allen counseled Bivens to junk his four-seamer in favor of a sinker that had wicked arm-side movement, and Bivens picked up a new slider grip from a post he ran across on social media. He showed up in Gastonia this spring sitting in the mid-90s with nasty movement.
“He was legit nasty,” says former big-league pitcher Deck McGuire, who met Bivens this spring with Gastonia, “and I had a pretty hard time understanding how he’d never had an affiliated job.”
To finally check that box, Bivens didn’t have to wait much longer. Though he’s heard an apparently apocryphal version of his discovery — San Francisco president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi is a very busy man with many responsibilities, and did not just happen to see a tweet with the righty’s pitch metrics — the Giants were indeed on his case. As a partner league of MLB, the Atlantic League provides advanced data to all major-league clubs, and the numbers undergirding Bivens’ new arsenal immediately popped off the spreadsheet. Bivens was the kind of low-cost bet the team should be making, says farm director Kyle Haines. “You can go with the common name that’s familiar on some of those sheets, but you probably know what you’re going to get,” Haines says. By contrast, Bivens offered something few indy ball players could: upside.
Thus, that fateful May phone call, the realization of years and years of scratching and clawing and sometimes just holding on. Bivens ended the conversation with a yes, and then with a question. Stretch was over in Gastonia, and the pitches were about to loosen up. “He asked if he could continue to play catch,” Haines says. Yes, the farm director replied. Just don’t get hurt.
When you’ve grinded that long, it’s hard to know when to stop.
Now, several chapters into his story, Bivens has reached what many other players would consider the starting line.
Just because he’s in doesn’t mean he’s not in danger of falling out. For years he’s climbed an organizational baseball ladder that older players were descending. Being 28 already is hardly an advantage. “If this is what he wants to do,” says Klimas, the Rogers State coach, “he has no choice but to go out there and perform.” Affiliated ball can be just another flavor of anonymity, and relievers approaching 30 tend to get their walking papers before 21-year-old draft picks.
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But Bivens hasn’t washed out yet. He posted a 2.70 ERA with Low-A San Jose, and he’d have similar numbers over two brief Triple-A stints if not for one rough outing. After watching him pitch without interference for two months to get a sense of his strengths and weaknesses, the Giants have lavished him with the same kind of analytical attention that they would any prospect. He’s sharpened a few pitches and has dramatically improved his understanding of how to deploy them. “The reps in Triple A really built a lot of confidence for him,” says Haines. “It built confidence in us, too.” Bivens’ fall league selection is a sign of the esteem in which San Francisco holds him. Each team is allowed to send only seven or eight players, and they don’t waste the slots on nobodies.
He’s close now — after five years as a professional, he’s finally signed an agent — but he is determined to fend off complacency. “I don’t know how to explain to my friends that nothing’s changed,” he says. “I haven’t made it.” His proximity has only intensified his determination. He wants to do it for his parents, who were always in his corner. He wants to do it for his grandmother in Virginia who is battling Parkinson’s. He wants to do it for his 13-year-old half-brother, who lives with his father in Japan. They communicate mostly by FaceTime. “I want him to see me play,” Bivens says. “I want him to know that you can do anything.”
Bivens has always believed that, even when few did. Now, as he squares up his first batter in the Fall Stars Game, it’s easier to find that confidence. The leadoff walk he issues might have shaken others, but Bivens settles down to retire the side with two strikeouts and a soft groundball to second. His fastball sits 93 mph. His arm feels fresh and he steps toward the dugout feeling light. Today, more than any time he can remember, anything feels possible.
(Top photo: Shelly Valenzuela / San Jose Giants)