BRADENTON, Fla. – If Patrick Kivlehan makes the Pirates’ roster out of spring training, it will be a good story because he is far from a lock at this point. Yet it won’t be the best baseball story for this former major-college safety.
The non-roster outfielder has made a good early impression in spring training after being signed to a minor-league contract in the offseason. He is 4-for-9 with a double, a home run and three RBIs in the early stages of the exhibition season.
“I’ve been able to get a couple of opportunities and am trying to make the most of them,” Kivlehan said. “I can’t complain.”
One opportunity the 29-year-old right-handed hitting Kivlehan thought he would never get when he decided to accept a football scholarship to Rutgers during his senior year of high school in Montvale, N.J., in 2008, was playing professional baseball.
He was sure his days on the diamond were done once he started playing safety for the Scarlet Knights.
“I always loved playing baseball, but I really loved playing football coming out of high school,” Kivlehan told me Thursday. “You can’t really do both in college, though. It’s too tough. I had more schools interested in me in football than baseball, so it was an easy choice.
While Kivlehan put baseball aside, he never fell out of love with the sport.
“I had played baseball my entire life and my freshman year, I missed playing,” he said. “My sophomore year, I missed it a little bit more. My junior year, I really missed it.”
So, during the spring of his senior year, in 2012, he decided to try out for the baseball team.
“I knew I wasn’t going to play in the NFL and I still had one semester to go before graduating, so I figured why not?” Kivlehan said.
What Kivlehan did on somewhat of a lark turned out to be one of the best stories in college baseball. Not only did he make the team, he excelled and wound up being the Big East Conference Player of the Year.
Granted, the level of play in the now-defunct Big East wasn’t the caliber of the ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 or SEC. Nevertheless, it was a respected Division I conference.
“A lot of it was a case of beginner’s luck,” Kivlehan said. “By the time people realized who I was and what I was doing, I didn’t have to face those (pitchers) again. I just got hot and kind of stayed hot. The strength I had from working out in football really translated to baseball more than I thought, and I kind of rode that out all spring.”
Kivlehan rode it all the way to becoming the Mariners’ fourth-round draft pick. In a few months, he went from being a bench guy who hadn’t played baseball in three years to a professional player.
Four years later, after the Padres claimed him off waivers from the Mariners, he was in the major leagues. He made his debut Aug. 20, hitting a home run off the Diamondbacks’ Robbie Ray in his second at-bat.
The Reds got Kivlehan from the Padres on a waiver claim during the final week of the season and he then appeared in 115 games for Cincinnati in 2017, primarily as a bench player.
Released by the Reds last May 1 while playing at Triple-A Louisville, Kivlehan signed with the Mets and hit 20 home runs in 98 games for Triple-A Las Vegas. The Diamondbacks then purchased his contract in September to help in what turned out to be a failed bid for a second consecutive National League West title.
While going back to the minor leagues after spending so much of the previous season in the big leagues was a bit hard to swallow, Kivlehan made the best of his situation in Las Vegas. And it wasn’t because he was hanging out on The Strip.
“We saw a couple of shows but it was mainly baseball,” he said with a smile. “It was definitely humbling, but I honestly had so much fun that it made me fall in love with the game all over again. It was a really good group of guys, a veteran group that made a lot of good memories and I’m still keeping in touch with a lot of those guys. It made it fun again.”
Though Kivlehan has hit just .208/.302/.401 in 242 major-league plate appearances, the Pirates were impressed with his .314/.372/.588 line with Las Vegas. Clint Hurdle said Kivlehan was a “priority” minor-league free agent for the Pirates at the beginning of the offseason.
Kivlehan faces an uphill battle as Corey Dickerson and Starling Marte have their spots in the starting outfield while some combination of Lonnie Chisenhall and/or Melky Cabrera will begin the season playing right field while Polanco recovers from shoulder surgery.
Nevertheless, Kivlehan is making himself noticed.
“I liked the vibe from Clint and the rest of the front office when they called me,” Kivlehan said. “I thought it would be something different, too, because I’d never had a spring training in Florida. It’d always been in Arizona. I was looking for something different, I got the feeling they wanted me, and I wanted to come here. It just all made sense. It’s been fun so far. I’m really enjoying it.”