The Boyds Are Back in Town

The Chicago Cubs got their offseason into gear Monday morning, with the reported signing of veteran left-handed pitcher Matthew Boyd to a two-year contract worth $14.5 million per year, plus incentives. Hey, Boyd is a name people know, and he had that one really good year a while back, didn’t he? There’s got to be a reason the Cubs are handing out a multi-year deal for almost $30 million to a pitcher who made eight starts in 2024, hasn’t broken 80 innings in a season since 2019, and turns 34 before the start of spring training.

It makes sense, but you have to work a little to see it.

Peak Matthew Boyd appeared in 2019, when he was in the top 10 in strikeout rate among qualified starters and threw 185 1/3 innings. Unfortunately, Boyd also allowed an American League-leading 39 home runs and played in front of a Detroit Tigers team that was beyond dog doodoo, finishing 47-114. So for all that splashy strikeout rate, all the Garrett Crochet-but-earlier-and-without-the-fastball-velocity, Boyd posted a 4.56 ERA in his career year.

He was one of the worst pitchers in baseball in the shortened 2020 season, and after that couldn’t stay healthy. Nevertheless, he popped up for a brief but effective stint as a reliever for the Mariners late in 2022, and helped them break the AL’s longest playoff drought at the time. It was especially meaningful for a player who’d grown up outside of Seattle, and unless your heart is made of stone, Boyd’s tearful post-clinch interview will make you want to hug a stranger.

A reunion with the Tigers was cut short when Boyd blew out his elbow in mid-2023 — and just as well; it was going pretty poorly anyway. Cleveland signed him off the street at the end of June 2024; six weeks later he was in the big league rotation, and come October he allowed just a single earned run over 11 2/3 innings in three playoff starts.

I think it’s plain for anyone to see why the Cubs would want to give Boyd a shot in the rotation; he was superb down the stretch and in the postseason. But two years and $29 million, plus incentives? For a guy whose last start of more than six innings came on April 24, 2021?

The best way I can put this is that the entire pitching market is 2015 Rich Hill now.

If you want a no. 1 starter, a pitcher who can reliably shut down an opponent in the playoffs and throw close to 200 innings a year — Zack Wheeler, Gerrit Cole, likely Corbin Burnes in a few weeks’ time — the going rate is about $40 million a year on a multi-year contract. For a pitcher who can come close to that, you’re looking at somewhere between the high 20s and low 30s per year, over a contract of five years or more.

Burnes and Blake Snell can demand that because there are very few pitchers out there like them. Teams that are either unwilling or unable to chase the top of the market have to compromise. For one or two years, in the low-to-mid tens of millions of dollars a season, you can get a reliable innings eater who’ll probably need to be shelved come the postseason. Or you can try to catch lightning in a bottle.

The Cubs tried the former in December 2022, signing Jameson Taillon to a four-year, $68 million contract. And he’s been pretty good. A year later, they took a risk on Shota Imanaga, who was too short, didn’t have ideal fastball velocity, allowed too many home runs, and had never faced American professional opposition on any kind of regular basis. Imanaga was even better.

A decade ago, trying to get one over on the starting pitching market was pretty cheap. In 2015, Hill came back from indy ball, nearly a decade removed from his best major league season, and put up bonkers numbers in a four-start tryout with the Red Sox. The A’s saw Hill, born anew after being baptized in a waterfall of curveballs, and thought they could get him to keep it up for a full season. It cost them only $6 million to try.

Taking a flier costs more now. The Cubs have guaranteed nearly five times that amount to Boyd, who had a couple decent seasons back when Game of Thrones was still on TV, and whose arms are tied to his torso with optimism and a Gordian knot of sutures. The Cubs obviously hope he’ll be better and more durable than he’s shown; more than that, they’ve bet $29 million that they’ve identified something within him that they can build on.

The Cubs have been pretty mediocre the past few seasons, so it’s hard to point at them and say, “This is what they do well,” but left-handed starting pitchers without elite velocity have been a strength of theirs. Not just Imanaga, but Justin Steele as well. Both of those pitchers, like Boyd, give up a lot of fly balls as well. (Boyd and Imanaga more than Steele, admittedly.)

I figured that even though Boyd is the biggest of the three, his low arm slot would give him a similar release point to Imanaga, but that’s about where the similarities end. Throwing arm and fastball velocity aside, these three have relatively little in common.

Steele is mostly fastball-slider, while Imanaga is fastball-splitter, playing ridiculous rise on his four-seamer against a hellacious low-spin splitter that’s unlike anything Boyd throws.

Boyd has a highly varied repertoire, throwing five pitches, none more than 38% of the time. And unlike Imanaga, who’s more up-and-down-ey, Boyd’s arsenal is extremely sideways-ey. Here’s what Boyd threw in competitive games in 2024, regular season and playoffs combined.

There are two things I like about Boyd’s arsenal, as expressed here. The first is that a lot of four-pitch pitchers have completely different repertoires for hitters on each side of the plate, so it’s not really one big bucket of pitches to choose from so much as it’s two small buckets. Boyd has different primary fastballs for lefties and righties, as well as different primary breaking balls. Like most pitchers, he throws more breaking balls to same-handed hitters and more changeups to opposite-handed hitters.

But he has at least four pitches in the mix to both lefties and righties, which makes it harder to sit on a specific pitch. Especially because his four-seamer and sinker, and his changeup and slider, are so closely matched in velocity.

Which leads into point no. 2: The horizontal movement. Boyd has pitches with at least a foot of average horizontal break, going in either direction. He has two pitches with at least 15 inches of average arm-side run — his sinker and his changeup. That’s a ton of movement — more than you’ll find from a breaking ball, apart from the most elite sweepers. In 2024, only five righty pitchers had two different offerings that averaged 15 inches or more of break away from right-handed hitters. And Boyd can do it either in the low 90s or the low 80s. Try covering both of those pitches.

Having such opposite break allows Boyd to play keepaway. Last season, 476 pitchers threw 500 or more pitches between the regular season and playoffs. Boyd was 34th in percentage of pitches that broke away from the hitter. Imanaga was no. 1. Of course, that’s not the only way to pitch; Steele was fourth from the bottom on that list.

Let’s play with the parameters a little. In 2024, 56.1% of Boyd’s pitches moved away from the hitter by 10 inches or more. That was 16th best in baseball, one spot ahead of Framber Valdez. A little further down the leaderboard you’ll find two other lefties who had the kind of mid-30s renaissance Boyd is hoping for: Chris Sale (19th) and Sean Manaea (22nd).

To me, Boyd’s ability to move the ball away from the hitter in all circumstances and velocity bands is the standout argument for making such a large commitment to him. Especially because it either matches or dovetails with what the Cubs have their other two lefties doing, and double-especially because Sale and Manaea had such big seasons after being in the wilderness, well, basically as long as Boyd had been.

But it’s still a $29 million commitment based on 11 starts and 51 1/3 innings of work. Given to a player who was literally dead last among qualified starters in WAR in 2020, which is more recent than his last full league-average season. But $29 million in guaranteed money doesn’t buy a sure thing anymore. Considering what the Dodgers are paying Snell and Tyler Glasnow these days, I’m not positive $150 million even gets you a sure thing.

So if the Cubs aren’t willing to swim in that part of the free agent pool, they’ve got to pick their targets carefully and hope they know what they’re doing. Because it doesn’t look like there’s such a thing as a low-risk, high-upside free agent starter anymore.