Player review: Spencer Bivens

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…