Former Missouri State outfielder Spencer Nivens was named the 30th and final player on the Bears’ roster as a redshirt freshman in 2022.
During the 2023 season, Nivens was named Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year. A month after the season ended, he was drafted in the 5th round by the Kansas City Royals.
Nivens is patiently working his way through the minor leagues. Last summer he played for the Single-A Columbia (South Carolina) Fireflies. It’s unclear if they’re called the Lightning Bugs once they head east.
Now he plays with the High-A Quad Cities River Bandits of the Midwest League. The mascot is a fierce raccoon that wears a black cowboy hat and a blue bandana to hide its identity.
It doesn’t work. It’s known as Rascal.
A time to play, and a time to eat
Luckily, Nivens doesn’t have to do anything nefarious to pay his rent. Thanks to the 2023 minor league collective bargaining agreement he stays in a free apartment — with just one roommate — close to the stadium.
Nivens said he’s still learning how to make his mornings count now that he’s out of school. He lives in Davenport, Iowa, one of the Quad Cities. The others are Bettendorf, Iowa; Moline, Illinois and Rock Island, Illinois.
“I wasn’t really aware of the amount of downtime that we’d get in the morning,” Nivens said. “All of our games throughout the week are at 6:30 or 7, so you have to find some stuff to do off the field.”
He’s not much for video games, but Nivens likes to play golf. Sometimes he gets a late breakfast with his teammates. Hold the mimosas, of course.
He intends to finish up his biology degree from Missouri State — eventually. Nivens compiled a 3.67 GPA through three years. For now, he spends his time competing against teams like the Cedar Rapids Kernels, the Lansing Lugnuts and Beloit Sky Carp.
But the River Bandits sound just as good.
“It’s up there,” he said and laughed about the name of the team. “It’s pretty cool.”
Good thing he likes the sound of it, since he’ll be a River Bandit for 140 games this season. It’s quite a change from playing 78 games between college and the minors in 2023.
“I thought I played a lot of games last year, and I looked, and it was like, about half of what I’ll play this year,” he said.
Finding a morning ritual
Nivens tries to do the same thing each morning.
“I like to wake up, have a cup of coffee and read my Bible to start my day,” he said.
Nivens grew up going to church but said he started to take his faith more seriously after leaving home in Columbia, Missouri, for Missouri State.
“The older I get the bigger part of my life it has become,” he said. “Now I’ve got a bunch of time and it’s good to use that to set a routine.”
He hasn’t found a church, but he’s happy the Royals have a chaplain at every affiliate.
“We get together with him and do a little chapel,” Nivens said. “He’ll talk to us and read to us a little bit, and we can have some conversation about it. It’s nice to have him around.”
Nivens keeps a verse in mind for when he gets rattled by the ups and downs of playing pro baseball.
“My phone lock screen is Philippians 4:6,” he said. “It talks about not being anxious.”
Nivens has enjoyed “a smooth ride” in pro ball so far, but he remembers the verse in times of failure — and success.
“It helps me out, like, when I do get a little emotional, good or bad,” he said. “You can’t ride the highs or the lows. That’s kind of the way I like to look at it.”
Spencer Nivens made his own way
Nivens’s dad, Matt, starred as a baseball player at Mizzou in the mid to late ’90s, but Spencer wanted to make his own path.
“I think it was good for me just to get out of Columbia,” he said. “I was still close enough to home to where my family could come watch me, but far enough away to where I could feel like I was on my own a bit.”
Still, he said his family attended “pretty much all the home games on the weekends.”
Nivens was named the Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year in 2023, his final season with the Bears. He was named an All-American in 2022, just the 43rd player in Missouri State baseball history to receive that honor.
Not bad for a guy who barely made the team.
‘He just hit' at Missouri State
Nivens spent the 2021 season as a redshirt, then had to earn a roster spot in 2022. Former Missouri State head coach Keith Guttin said Nivens wasn’t intimidated.
“He never hesitated,” Guttin said. “He never backed down and he never said, ‘I’m going somewhere else.’ He just hit.”
“Yeah, I was ready,” Nivens said. “It was a fun year.”
That’s not to say he didn’t worry.
“I was definitely worried,” Nivens said. “But it was easy to go out there and just kind of play with no pressure because I didn’t really have anything to lose at that point.”
Guttin concurred.
“It’s a great story,” Guttin said. “He became a great player who was kind of a quiet leader that everybody respected.”
MSU teammate Drake Baldwin, now with the Atlanta Braves organization, said he was impressed that Nivens stayed at Missouri State.
“He was like, ‘I’m gonna go and win this spot,’” Baldwin said. “He just kept his head down and kept working, as he always does.”
Nivens’ keen eye at the plate made him a dangerous hitter with the Bears. Baldwin said Nivens took balls and hit strikes — hard. Easy to say; tough to do.
“When you’re scouting guys — I know from being a catcher — if I see that combination from an opposing hitter, I’m circling him and saying, ‘Don’t let him beat us,’” Baldwin said.
Getting to the bigs — with support
Nivens said he was happy to be drafted by Kansas City — but not for the reasons you might think.
“A lot of their minor league teams are pretty close to home,” Nivens said, “It’s cool that my family will be able to come to quite a few games if they decide to make the trip.”
He’s close with his parents, sister Taylor and girlfriend Teagan Polcovich, a former Missouri State volleyball player.
Incidentally, Polcovich’s father, Kevin, played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for a couple of years in the late ‘90s. Now her brother, Kalen, plays in the Mariners system. He’s currently with the Double-A Arkansas Travelers.
Nivens says he’s never competed against Kalen, though they train together in the batting cages when they get the chance. That may change once Nivens gets promoted to the Northwest Arkansas Naturals. Both teams play in the Texas League, which includes the Springfield Cardinals.
Not that he’s in a rush.
“I know the Royals have some benchmarks that they like their players to hit before they make it all the way up,” Nivens said. “They’ve got a rough estimate of the number of at-bats they’d like to see.”
A Bandit who only steals bases
In the meantime, he’s trying to pick up what he can.
“There’s always things to learn, so it’s good to use this time to learn from the coaches that have been doing this for a while,” he said.
For example, Nivens enjoys reading pitchers.
“There are lots of little tricks, like, you can look at a pitcher and see whether they’re keeping the same timing or they’re holding their glove in different ways,” he said.
He explained a bit about stealing bases, starting with estimating how far he leads off a base.
“We take two steps and then shuffle off a couple of times,” Nivens said. “Maybe 8, 10 feet.”
Does his heart skip a beat when the pitcher throws over?
“A little bit — if they’ve got a quick move over there — but not usually,” he said.
Once on base, some players pull on sliding mitts to protect their fingers from oversized bases and opponents’ cleats. Nivens prefers old-fashioned batting gloves. He estimates he can travel between bases in just under four seconds. As far as whether it’s quicker to slide feet-first or dive, he takes a practical approach.
“If my hips are all scraped up, I’ll dive headfirst,” he said.
When he dives so much that his knees bleed, he switches to a feet-first slide, popping up on either his left or right foot.
“Whichever knee is scraped up, I’ll usually just do the opposite,” he said.
Father knows best
As Nivens prepares for the next step, he confides in his “go-to person” — his dad, Matt.
“He knows where I’m coming from,” Spencer said, “And he’s got some good advice for me when I’m going through it.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean he always listens to his father.
“He’s like, ‘Take care of your knees so you don’t have problems later,” Spencer said. “He’s always yelling at me to wrap them up — but I always forget.”
Still, Nivens is happy to learn as much as he can on the long path to the big leagues.
“Obviously, I’d like to get up (to the majors) as quickly as possible, but I’m not in a super huge rush either,” he said. “I know that the right time will come. And when it does, I’ll be ready.”
