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Matt Boyd Legitimate Breakout Candidate Despite Age, Injuries

Photo of Michael Canter Michael CanterJanuary 27, 2025

It’s hard to believe, but Cubs pitchers and catchers report to Arizona in two weeks. There is nothing in sports like the time from the Super Bowl to Opening Day. Fans of the NFL, PGA, NASCAR, and college basketball get their sports fix fulfilled. For Cubs fans, it’s when hope genuinely springs eternal. You might even see a smile on my face, a rarity for a curmudgeon like me.

Kyle Tucker is Jed Hoyer’s most significant offseason acquisition, but who do you think will be this year’s under-the-radar star? Shōta Imanaga outperformed every projection model last season, relying mostly on his four-seamer and splitter. Matt Boyd is a fastball-changeup-slider guy, which almost feels old-timey in today’s game, but I’m expecting a breakout year if he stays healthy. My belief is based on Boyd’s small but mouthwatering 2024 performance that featured a 2.72 ERA with 46 strikeouts in 39.2 innings.

That doesn’t include Boyd’s playoff performances with the Guardians. He held the Tigers scoreless in two outings in the divisional round and gave up just one run in his start against the Yankees in the ALCS. He had 14 strikeouts against six walks in 11.2 postseason innings without allowing a home run. But there is more to it than that. I’m not as analytically inclined as most Cubs bloggers, but I do know enough to understand the three most important components for a successful pitcher are power, control, and command. Keeping the baseball from leaving the ballpark helps a lot, too.

Let’s get the red flags out of the way before I get into why Boyd is a late-career breakout candidate.

  1. Boyd hasn’t pitched more than 80 innings in any season since 2019 despite working exclusively as a starter.
  2. Few pitchers break out in or after their age-34 seasons because that’s when starters tend to break down; it’s one of the more precarious ages for baseball players, especially pitchers.
  3. Boyd was the beneficiary of both good defense (+2 OAA while he was pitching) and bad defense (25% of the runs he allowed were unearned) to help keep his ERA under 3.00.

There’s no denying that Boyd carries some baggage, especially for a guy who turned a handful of starts into a guaranteed two-year deal worth $29 million that includes another $1 million in performance bonuses. That seems like a mammoth stretch for Hoyer, who has never been accused of being profligate when shopping for free agents. Nobody wanted Boyd a year ago while he was recovering from Tommy John surgery. What on earth, other than the current pitching market, could have convinced Hoyer to take that leap of faith?

From his debut on August 13 to the end of the season, Boyd’s 0.9 WAR led Cleveland’s pitching staff. That’s 3.6 WAR over 32 starts when scaled across a full season, a mark that would have fallen between Framber Valdez and Yusei Kikuchi for ninth among AL pitchers. Boyd replaces Kyle Hendricks, who pitched to a 4.14 ERA across 41.1 innings after August 15 to close out his career with the Cubs.

Boyd’s peripheral numbers were substantially better than Hendricks’s, including his 3.10 xERA and 27.7% whiff rate. The lefty’s scant 0.9 HR/9 allowed was much better than Imanaga (1.40) and trailed only Justin Steele (.80) among the Cubs’ 2024 starters. Those numbers are much better than his career norms, and he posted them while pitching his home games in a stadium with the 11th-highest home run park factor in MLB (106). Wrigley Field was a pitcher-friendly ballpark last year, ranking 26th in HR factor (85), but no guarantee exists that this summer’s weather will follow suit.

It’s also worth noting that Boyd used his changeup last season more than any other year of his career. The results were astounding, to say the least. He induced a 21.1% swinging strike rate on that pitch, setting it up with a fastball-heavy repertoire early in the count. Hitters will adjust and come up swinging — his unexpected success will dictate that — so Boyd will also need to recalibrate. His fastball sits at 92 mph, making his changeup (81 mph) nearly lethal. His secondary efforts include a slider (80), sinker (92), and curve (74).

It’s entirely possible that Boyd’s 2025 adjustment could lie in the effectiveness of his sinker. Tommy Hottovy is a proponent of throwing sinkers high in the zone, and Cubs pitchers tend to throw theirs at the batters’ wrists to induce strikeouts instead of groundouts. At the peak of his career, Hendricks was perhaps the best at using his sinker as that kind of weapon.

Hottovy explained the success of the pitch a few years back.

“What makes a pitch effective is the perceived movement that the hitter thinks is going to happen,” he told The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma ($). “A hitter has seen so many pitches move a certain way with a certain spin. When they see that same spin, and they react, and it’s [moving differently than normal], those are the types of pitches you’re trying to create. That’s why it’s so unique and difficult to do. When they do it, that’s when you have those outliers, the pitches that look like they should be going one way and go another or move further than they should.”

That’s a heckuva word salad for the concept of late movement, which tends to limit barrels and keep batters off guard. Some experts say increased use of a sinker also helps to limit arm injuries because of its decreased reliance on extreme wrist snap. Its effectiveness lies in its velocity; lower spin rates are less taxing and make the pitch much more difficult to hit. In other words, expect Boyd to throw the pitch a little more than his 10.2% utilization in 2024 if only to keep aggressive batters honest at the top of the count.

Regardless, Boyd meets two of the three criteria for success (control and command) that I mentioned earlier. He lacks elite velocity, but he keeps the ball in the park. Boyd will be seen as a fantastic value or a wash based on his 2025 workload. The key is sustainability and maintaining those peripherals across a full season which the Cubs hope includes 120 innings pitched. That probably means 20-25 starts of five or six innings, which is why Hoyer is still trying to add to his bullpen.

The comparisons to Drew Smyly you may have read are inaccurate. Hoyer could have retained Smyly at a much lower cost were that the case. That said, Boyd’s acquisition is a pure hunch play, a little off the beaten path for an executive who tends to be as deliberate as they come.

I rarely give Hoyer the benefit of the doubt, but I want to this time because he sees something many do not. I also have this untested theory that pitchers are aging and performing better in the latter stages of their careers than at any time since Nolan Ryan retired. For Boyd, the performance bar is far too low to warrant that contract, especially with his injury history and Chicago’s desire to reduce salary. Perhaps something surprising lies ahead.

Photo of Michael Canter Michael CanterJanuary 27, 2025
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