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September 10, 2026
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.

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