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Sep 10, 2026
Giants
The Bart chain

The Giants Have Ended Up With What Atlanta Paid For Joey Bart

San Francisco claimed right-hander Duncan Davitt off waivers from the Braves on Wednesday. Atlanta acquired him five weeks ago, from the White Sox, in exchange for the catcher San Francisco took second overall in 2018. The 40-man roster was full, so the claim cost Spencer Bivens his spot on it.

GL
Grant LombardSep 10, 20265 min read
Every call on this site goes on a public ledger and gets graded. The misses stay up.
Spencer Bivens in a posed head-and-shoulders portrait against a plain grey background, wearing a black San Francisco Giants cap and a cream home jersey. A league media headshot, not from a game.

San Francisco claimed a relief pitcher off waivers on Wednesday. It has claimed five players off waivers since August 13, so on its own this is a Wednesday.

Here is the part that is not a Wednesday.

The pitcher is Duncan Davitt, he is 26, and Atlanta got him on August 3 from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for Joey Bart. San Francisco drafted Joey Bart second overall in 2018 and paid him $7,025,000 to sign. Two and a half years and three trades after giving up on him, the Giants have what he was worth.

The chain, in order, off MLB's own transaction log#

San Francisco designated Bart for assignment on March 31, 2024, and traded him to Pittsburgh on April 2 for a right-hander named Austin Strickland. Pittsburgh traded Bart to Atlanta on June 18 of this year for Hunter Stratton. Atlanta traded Bart to the White Sox on August 3 for Davitt. Chicago activated Bart on August 4 and put him on the 10-day injured list on August 7 with a fractured fifth metacarpal in his left hand, which is where he still is.

Then Atlanta put Davitt on waivers and San Francisco claimed him. (Atlanta had him for thirty-seven days. Chicago designated him for assignment on August 3 and traded him to Atlanta on August 3, which is one busy morning for a man who has thrown two innings this year.)

That is three organizations for Bart in 2026 alone. Davitt has been on three too, and he has thrown two major league innings all year. Bart hit .215 with 11 home runs in 97 games for the Giants in 2022, his busiest season here. He hit .265 with 13 in 80 games for Pittsburgh the year after they got him. Giants fans have been carrying that pair of lines around since 2024 and they are not the argument here.

Austin Strickland is the part nobody has written down. He signed with Pittsburgh in July 2023, came to San Francisco in the Bart trade at 21, and never pitched in a major league game. The Eugene Emeralds, San Francisco's High-A club, released him on August 3, 2026.

Read that date again. The Giants let go of what they got for Joey Bart on the same day Atlanta bought what they have now claimed. Nobody planned that. It is just what the log says.

The 40-man was full, which is why this cost somebody#

San Francisco's 40-man roster endpoint returns 55 names. Fifteen of them are on the 60-day injured list and do not count, which leaves 28 active, seven in the minor leagues, four on the 10-day and one on the 15-day. Forty. Exactly forty.

So Davitt did not arrive into a vacancy. He arrived into Spencer Bivens.

Bivens went undrafted out of Rogers State in 2018 and started his professional career with the Lions de Savigny-sur-Orge, a French club outside Paris. He pitched in Prague in 2020 until the pandemic sent him home. He threw for the Washington Wild Things in the Frontier League and then for the Gastonia Honey Hunters in the Atlantic League, added about 25 pounds over the winter of 2021, narrowed his repertoire to a sinker and a sweeper, and turned up the following spring throwing in the mid-90s. Kyle Haines, the Giants' director of player development, called him in May 2022 with a minor league contract. Maria Guardado of MLB.com reported all of that in March 2024, three months before Bivens made his major league debut at 29.

That first year he threw 48.2 innings at a 3.14 earned run average. The next one was 81 innings in 54 appearances at 4.00. A 62-85 club is supposed to be for exactly this man.

This season he has pitched five innings. Two of them were scoreless, against Toronto on July 6 and July 8. Then Cincinnati scored four earned runs off him in one inning on August 26 and Arizona scored four more in two innings on August 28, and a 32-year-old reliever with eight earned runs in five innings is a 40-man spot somebody else can use.

What each club decided#

Atlanta is 85-61. It looked at a 26-year-old right-hander who has thrown two major league innings all year, decided he was not worth one of its forty, and exposed him.

San Francisco is 62-85 and eliminated in both columns, with 15 games left. It looked at the same pitcher and decided he was worth one of its forty, and then sent him to Sacramento, where he has not thrown a pitch. His last appearance anywhere was September 6, for Atlanta's Double-A club in Columbus. (This is not a criticism. A club with nothing left to win in 2026 collecting cheap option years on 26-year-old arms is doing the job in front of it. It is a smaller job than the one it was doing in 2018.)

Anyway. Eight years ago the Giants had the second pick in the draft and spent seven million dollars on a catcher. This week they finally got something for him, by claiming it off somebody else's waiver wire, and it cost them a man who once pitched in Prague.

Filed under Giants

More on Duncan Davitt

The innings

Spencer Bivens Threw More Innings In Sacramento Than Any Giants Reliever Threw In San Francisco

The Kansas City Royals claimed right-hander Spencer Bivens off waivers from San Francisco on September 12 and optioned him to Triple-A Omaha the same day, per both clubs' transaction feeds. San Francisco had designated him for assignment on September 9, the day it claimed Duncan Davitt off Atlanta, and its 40-man roster read 40 of 40 before the designation and reads 40 of 40 now. Bivens threw 75.0 innings in 35 appearances for Sacramento in 2026 at a 4.92 earned run average, and 5.0 innings in four appearances for San Francisco at 14.40. No San Francisco pitcher who made fewer than two starts threw more than JT Brubaker's 60.1 major league innings this season, and the leader among pitchers who made none is Caleb Kilian at 44.1. In 2025 Bivens led every San Francisco reliever with 81.0 innings in 54 games. Kansas City's open 40-man spot traced to the Yankees claiming John Schreiber on August 31. San Francisco has designated 13 players in 2026 and another club has claimed two of them. Omaha's season ends September 20. No take filed: both bounced at the desk price.

Grant LombardSep 13, 20265 min read
Spencer Bivens Threw More Innings In Sacramento Than Any Giants Reliever Threw In San Francisco

On the record

Called Shots →
OpenSep 10, 2026

Duncan Davitt is not on San Francisco's 40-man roster on December 2, 2026.

San Francisco claimed Davitt off waivers from Atlanta on September 9 and optioned him to Sacramento the same day, which is a club buying option years rather than innings. Three things argue he does not survive the winter. Atlanta, at 85-61, had him for five weeks and would not spend one of its forty on him. Chicago designated him for assignment on August 3, the day it traded for him, so two clubs have discarded him in a five-week span. And San Francisco's own November crunch is measurable rather than a hunch: fifteen men currently sit on the 60-day injured list and every one of them returns to the 40-man in November, against a roster already at 40 of 40. The case for keeping him is real and it is why this is priced at -160 rather than shorter: he is 26, he is cheap, he has option years left, and a club spends a claim precisely because it wants the winter to look at him. RESTATEMENT CHECK, run against all 47 open Giants rows. Andie Townsend's 2026-09-04 row asks whether San Francisco designates at least THREE players for assignment between November 1 and December 1; that is a count with one exit route, this names one player and covers six routes, and either can be right while the other is wrong. The four Opening Day 2027 rows (Whitcomb, Wick, Lonsway, Walker) resolve four months later and against the spring squeeze rather than the Rule 5 deadline. No open row names Davitt.

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Left versus right

Remove Rafael Devers and the Giants are still 25th against left-handed pitching

Rafael Devers posted a .573 OPS against left-handed pitching and a 1.027 OPS against right-handed pitching in 2026, a gap of 454 points and the largest of any qualified left-handed hitter in the major leagues. Remove his 220 plate appearances against left-handers from San Francisco's team totals and the Giants improve from .669 to .684, which moves them from 28th to 25th of thirty and leaves them 22 points below the league median of .706. The 40-man roster holds 18 position players, nine right-handed and nine left-handed, and no switch-hitter; four of the thirty clubs are in that position. Willy Adames, the club's primary right-handed bat, hit worse against left-handed pitching than against right-handed pitching. The best right-handed answer in the system is 22-year-old Lorenzo Meola, who is at Single-A San Jose. One take filed.

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Six and six

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Thirteen pitchers started a game for San Francisco in 2026. Seven of them are unavailable for the final homestand: Tyler Mahle was traded to Atlanta on August 2 and Robbie Ray to San Diego on August 3, while Trevor McDonald, JT Brubaker, Carson Whisenhunt, Adrian Houser and Logan Webb are all on the injured list. Those seven made 105 of the club's 156 starts, or 67.3 percent. Measured the same way on the same morning, with all thirty clubs carrying 28-man active rosters, that is the highest figure in the major leagues; the league median is 27.2 percent and Toronto is second at 50.0. The six starters still standing are Landen Roupp (29 starts), Blade Tidwell (8), Matt Wilkinson (5), Anthony Molina (4), Cesar Perdomo (3) and Yunior Marte (2), for six games in seven days. Wilkinson threw five scoreless innings at Dodger Stadium on Sunday with a career-high six strikeouts in a 3-1 loss. Tidwell starts against Minnesota tonight. One take filed.

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Two starts

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San Francisco placed Logan Webb on the 15-day injured list on September 18 with a right middle finger blister and shut him down for the season, ending a year in which he made 27 starts and threw 160 2/3 innings at a 4.31 earned run average. It is his second injured list stint of 2026; he did not start for 20 San Francisco games in May with right knee bursitis. The 160 2/3 innings end a run of three straight seasons above 200, and two more starts at this year's rate would have left him near 172. His innings per start has fallen in each of the three seasons since 2023: 6.55, 6.20, 6.09, 5.95. Over his last five starts he allowed 23 earned runs in 21 2/3 innings. Landen Roupp has already made more starts than Webb this season, the first time anyone on the club has since 2021, and needs six innings across his remaining turns to pass him in innings as well. Hayden Birdsong, Trevor McDonald and Carson Whisenhunt are all on the club's injured list rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. One take filed.

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Earlier on the Giants

Feature

The last time Rafael Devers played third base, an umpire put him there

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Ten Pitchers Have Started A Game For The Giants This Season, And Three Of Them Cannot Start Another

San Francisco has played 127 games and used ten starting pitchers, tied for the sixth-fewest in the majors against a league median of thirteen. Three of those ten are unavailable: Tyler Mahle was traded to Atlanta on August 2, Robbie Ray to San Diego on August 3, and Trevor McDonald has been on the injured list since July 21 with a strained right elbow. Between them they made 53 of the 127 starts and threw 287.2 of the club's 677 starting innings. Seven pitchers covered the first 111 games; seven have covered the sixteen since the deadline, three of them names that had never started a major league game for the Giants. Boston has named Jake Bennett for Sunday and San Francisco has named nobody.

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