Last week was awards week in Major League Baseball. Spencer Bivens didn’t win any of them.
His team, the San Francisco Giants, didn’t make the playoffs.
Free agent outfielder Juan Soto is expected to sign a contract worth more than $600 million this winter. Bivens won’t command anywhere near that kind of money.
A disappointing season for the lanky relief pitcher from Boalsburg? Hardly.
After five years of bouncing around the fringes of professional baseball, Spencer got the call to the majors in June, just before his 30th birthday. He got the win in his first appearance and got his first save in his last — the Giants’ last game of the season. All told, he appeared in 27 games, pitching well in most of them.
I met Spencer for breakfast in downtown State College a few days ago. I’d written about his debut during the summer, but now that he was back in town I wanted to hear what he had to say about his dream-come-true season.
I hadn’t seen him since he and my son Ethan were teammates at State High more than a decade ago. At 6-foot-5, 205 pounds, he was a lot bigger than I remembered.
Planning to work out after breakfast, he wore a gray hoodie with the Giants logo on the front. When he sat down, I noticed he had tattoos on each wrist representing his two hometowns: a map of Pennsylvania on his left wrist with a red star in the middle, where Boalsburg and State College are; and a map of Virginia with a red star where Virginia Beach is.
He’s spent the first part of the off-season in both places, working out with Penn State’s baseball team when he’s here. Next month, he’ll go down to Florida to work out, then in February it’s “back to ‘go’ mode” at the Giants’ spring training camp in Arizona.
Manager Bob Melvin’s parting words to Spencer before the team dispersed at season’s end was that “they have plans” for him, meaning if all goes well, he can expect to be on the Giants’ Opening Day roster in Cincinnati on March 27.
But nothing’s guaranteed in baseball, as Spencer well knows after having twice been sent back down to the minors after his stellar debut. I asked him how it felt to be demoted after having pitched so well. Here’s where his long apprenticeship in the minor leagues gave him the resilience a 20-year-old phenom might have lacked.
“If I was younger, I might have let it get to me,” he said. “I’ve experienced everything baseball has to offer.”
The uncertainty is keeping Spencer from being a kid in a candy store now that he’s making decent money. I didn’t press him to disclose how decent. The Major League minimum salary for 2024 was $740,000, of which Spencer received a pro-rated amount based on the number of days he spent with the team.
So far, he’s allowed himself to replace his 2011 Acura with a newer-model Lexus, but he’s still living at home, in his childhood bedroom, much to the delight of his mom, Caran Aikens.
Whatever success he has from here on, Spencer’s career won’t be a long one, given his age. But he takes comfort from Giants coach (and former Phillies player) Pat Burrell, who has known him since his days as a struggling Minor Leaguer and sees him as an eventual mentor to younger players.
“I will never let you leave the game of baseball,” Burrell told him. “You have too much to share.”
And whatever happens this coming season, he’ll always have sweet memories of 2024 to savor:
- On June 30, he retired the incomparable Shohei Ohtani all three times he faced him, twice on strikeouts.
- During that same game, Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, who would go on to be the most valuable player of the World Series, tipped his cap to Spencer in acknowledgement of his arduous journey to the big leagues.
- He developed warm friendships with veteran teammates Jorge Soler, Blake Snell and Robbie Ray, established stars all.
Above all, though, there was that first game on June 16 against the Los Angeles Angels. Spencer took the mound to start the second inning. He struck out the first Big League hitter he ever faced, gave up a home run to the second, then retired the next eight.
The Giants won, 13-6. At the bottom of the box score, it says, “WP Spencer Bivens (1-0).” When it was over, after basking in the congratulations of his coaches and teammates, after facing the scrum of reporters around his locker, he celebrated with his parents.
The jersey he wore that day occupies a place of honor in the living room of his mom’s house in Boalsburg.
His take on his first taste of The Show, as the Big Leagues are called in the baseball world: “It’s life changing, to say the least. I enjoyed every bit of it.”
