In 2024, the 29-year old right-hander’s debut in the big leagues was the feel-good story of the year. He had spent a decade on a very long-and-winding road with no promise it would guide him anywhere. Still he kept his head down and followed his feet, trusting that if they kept leading him to a pitcher’s mound, it would work out. Considering the persistence and faith required, the fact that Bivens threw a single pitch in the Major Leagues bordered on the miraculous.

But you know what often follows a miracle? The monotonous rock-tumbler called Life. The professional peak Bivens reached last June wasn’t a resting perch, it wasn’t decked-out in laurels, it just flattened out into a plateau. A long ridge rolled out in front of him, another path to keep truckin’ down.

I wrote in last year’s review:

“Of course, the Majors aren’t the end of the road, they’re just another stretch of highway, a journey themselves.”

Keeping to the path and staying the course is what Bivens does best. His 2025 was a success in the sense that he maintained his pace and kept moving forward with one foot always following the other. His on-field performance — though far from exemplary — was consistent and serviceable, and that kept him in a Major League uniform for a complete season.

Bivens appeared in 54 games, tossed 81 innings — the most of any Giant reliever. He recorded three saves in the last week of the regular season, but the majority of times Bivens handled the baseball was in a low-leverage game situation. Often there were runners on base, and thanks to a high-groundball rate only 29% of those inherited runners scored (league-average was 34%).

Though his mid-90s sinker was his cornerstone offering, he continued a trend he established in the late months of last season by leaning more on his cutter than his sweeper. The pitches swapped in priority. The cutter usage increased from 10% to 26% while the sweeper usage (used primarily against righties) fell from 24% to 8%. I’m not quite sure why the sweeper fell so out of favor, but the choice to highlight a different fastball-type mirrored a similar decision made by Logan Webb. The increase usage of cutter and 4-seam by Webb changed the sight-line of the hitters and helped increase his effectiveness in the bottom of the zone. It’s slight glove-side run also kept lefties honest in the box, preventing them from cheating out over the plate to dig out sinkers and change-ups tailing away from them. Bivens saw some similar benefits, especially for his primary pitch. Opposing hitters’ batting averages against the sinker dropped from .299 to .283, and their slugging percentage plummeted from .483 to .389.

That pitch-specific effectiveness can be seen in Bivens’s overall numbers. He was much better at suppressing extra bases in 2025, whittling a rough .489 SLG in 2024 down to a league-average .408. His HR/9 dropped from 1.7 to 0.7 and his FIP from 4.79 to 3.70.

Unfortunately this development didn’t directly translate into on-field success. While he kept the ball in the park better, maintained a similarly excellent groundball rate, and solid hard-hit rate, Bivens’ ERA rose from 3.14 to 4.00 probably because the batting average of balls in play jumped from .266 to .316. All you need to know about that brutal 50-point leap in tough-luck can be found in the 11th inning of the Giants eventual 5-2 loss to the Dodgers on July 13th.

It was the final game before the All-Star Break. The Giants were 8-games above .500 and had actually played good baseball against their division rivals. The first two games of the weekend series, split between them, were decided by one run. That Sunday afternoon, Luis Matos flipped the game on its head, erasing the effect of a Yoshinobu Yamamoto gem, by ripping a game-tying 2-run homer off reliever Tanner Scott in the bottom of the 9th. Momentum seemed to shift in the Giants favor, but they failed to score in the 10th, even after newly arrived Rafael Devers rifled a 106 MPH liner to deep center with runners on base. What seemed sure to land as a game winner was chased down by center fielder James Outman. And because we live in an unjust world that relishes ironic twists of the knife, the contact that did flip the game in LA’s favor were two wet-rag flares that maxed out at 70 MPH off the bat sandwiching an infield single.

That string of soft knocks — all with two outs — came in the middle of a rough stretch for Bivens (8.53 ERA over 12.2 IP in July) and foreshadowed San Francisco’s dark days looming on the other side of the Mid-Summer Classic. A 2-10 end to July pushed the front office to sell away their relief corps at the deadline, a decision that probably cost the team a chance to sneak into the postseason through the backdoor.

The fact that very little changed in the calendar year was the major career development for Spencer Bivens. I have no doubt he could remain viable again in 2026 and put up results similar to what he did in 2024 and 2025 — but that’s his ceiling. The club won’t be looking to give him starts, or thread him into more high-leverage, late-inning scenarios. The warm-and-fuzzies from his debut have dissipated. Bivens is just here now: a blue collar big leaguer who is likeable, relatable…and not getting any younger. He’s a garbage disposal for the scrap innings that inevitably get left on the plate during a long season. There’s obvious value in having that kind of bulk arm in the pen, but no club is too particular about who gets that job done as long as it gets done. Following that logic, why not let it be Bivens?