What an 18 months it has been for Matthew Boyd. There were rough outings, arm pain that turned into a prolonged injury that turned into surgery. The Tigers, a team he grew to love, non-tendered him, and he had to leave the city where he was one of few players to make a home and establish roots. He signed with the Giants and dreamed of a midseason return, then had another setback with his arm. It led to a trade-deadline switch to Seattle, where Boyd pitched 13 1/3 innings of relief, got to spray champagne, celebrated breaking a 20-year playoff drought, and shouted into the camera about childhood heroes like Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez, who made him fall in love with baseball.
Advertisem*nt
“It’s been a wide gamut of emotions,” Boyd said Wednesday. “It’s been humbling; it’s been exciting.”
Somehow this journey has taken a circuitous route back to Detroit. Boyd’s one-year, $10-million deal with the Tigers finally became official Wednesday afternoon. On a video call shortly after the team announced the deal, Boyd’s trademark optimism shined through once again. Boyd waxed on about his memories with the Tigers, about long summer nights at Comerica, walks through downtown Detroit, time spent up in northern Michigan. Call it a cure for wintertime cynicism.
“The things I’ve said over the first seven years here in Detroit about winning a championship, what it would mean to the city and the region, those things don’t just go away overnight because you get released,” Boyd said. “Those are emotions that you’re tied to.”
Hear what it means to @mattboyd48 💙 pic.twitter.com/lDdXd1q5yZ
— ROOT SPORTS™ | NW (@ROOTSPORTS_NW) October 1, 2022
He also delivered vintage Boyd belief. He said it with such conviction that you can believe he feels it deep down in his soul. He thinks he will be better than the last time he pitched in a Tigers jersey. Knows it, practically promises it.
“All through that time (I’ve known) that the best is ahead of me, my best baseball is ahead of me,” Boyd said. “I felt like I was coming into it before that injury, and I feel like I’ve only used this last year and a half to continue to get better.”
Listen to Boyd talk for a few minutes, and it is easy to dive into a familiar, perhaps hazardous, territory. Observers in Detroit have seen Boyd at his best. When he came within one out of a no-hitter in ’17, when he struck out 13 on a bitter-cold night at Yankee Stadium, when he got off to terrific starts in 2018, 2019 and again in 2021. We’ve also seen the other side — the 39 home runs allowed in ’19, the 15 surrendered in 2020, the nibbling around the strike zone, the not-quite-fulfilled promise of a pitcher who is almost very good.
Advertisem*nt
Scott Harris, the Tigers’ president of baseball operations, seems like Boyd’s biggest believer. He signed the injured Boyd with the Giants last spring. He signed Boyd again this offseason, his first major-league deal as Detroit’s top baseball executive. Boyd will be making $10 million plus performance incentives, quite the raise from the $6.5 million he made last time he wore the Olde English D. Such a signing left parts of the fan base miffed — we have heard extensive talks of Harris bringing new energy and transformative ideas. Harris’ first major move, though, was retreading a pitcher the Tigers non-tendered at the end of 2021.
Harris casts it a different way. He says the Tigers are bringing in a different version of Boyd.
“I think there are some elements of his game that have developed and improved since he left,” Harris said. “I worked with him firsthand on that in San Francisco, and I think he flashed some of the adjustments he made when he pitched in Seattle. If you go back and watch any of those outings, I think you can see changes to individual pitches, to his attack plan and some slight changes to his mechanics that are helping his stuff play up. All those things and many more attracted us to Matt.”
Boyd has long been known as a pitcher who likes tweaks. He admits he might have gone overboard after his breakout 2019 campaign. “I think home runs were an issue,” he said. “Missing bats was not an issue. It’s weird to say those in the same sentence. But I tweaked, and I probably tweaked a little too much.”
In his brief time with the Giants, the data-driven Boyd was able to see his game through the perspective of new coaches and a different front office. He’s indicated he dove into biomechanics, and made small mechanical changes starting from the ground up. He developed a better understanding of his fastball, which he is now unafraid to fire atop the zone. He seems confident his slider — the one that generated a 43.6 whiff rate in 2019 — can return to its form as a dominant putaway option.
Advertisem*nt
Most importantly, Boyd said the changeup he was beginning to hone the last time we saw him in Detroit has continued its improvement.
“I learned a changeup with the staff over there in San Francisco that truly, it’s just different than anything I’ve ever thrown, without getting into too specific of details to bore people,” Boyd said. “But it plays different, and it plays better.”
Because Boyd barely pitched in 2021, there’s limited public data from which we can reference. But Harris talked of watching Boyd’s outings with Seattle, namely the three scoreless outings he threw against the Tigers on Oct. 3, when he struck out five batters and induced 10 swinging strikes.
The small sample of pitch data shows only minor changes in Boyd’s pitch characteristics. The spin on his fastball slightly increased (2,333 rpm in 2021 to 2,482 rpm) and his changeup drops a tad more vertically but moves less horizontally. There were more noticeable alterations in his changeup from 2019 to the end of the 2020 season.
The pitch data from last year is intriguing, though: Boyd threw 36 changeups. Only 27.8 percent for strikes, though many seemed to be intentionally out of the zone. The whiff rate skyrocketed to 58.8 percent. Only five of those 36 changeups got put in play.
Both the fastball and change are leaving his hand with a slightly different tilt, too.
“I think trying to distill it down to one main theme: He pounds the zone, and he misses bats,” Harris said. “If he can lock in that version of himself and keep the pressure on the hitter, he’s gonna be really good this year. I think we saw that when we signed him in San Francisco, and he’s only gotten better since.”
Last season in Seattle, Boyd’s 10 appearances all came in relief, creating an intriguing question of whether Boyd’s talents could be better served in short bursts. He was a reliever for most of his college career at Oregon State, after all.
Advertisem*nt
Boyd, though, said returning as a starter was “a non-negotiable.”
“That kind of sounds egotistical, but my job is to make that an easy decision,” Boyd said.
There is plenty of room to be skeptical about whether Boyd’s return to Detroit will be a success. There is risk inherent with the price tag. But it is ultimately a low-stakes, one-year deal. If things go well but the Tigers aren’t in contention, he could be traded midseason. If things go poorly, he’s not under contract beyond this year.
Listen to Boyd talk, though, and that old charm resurfaces. Harris also listed team chemistry as a large factor in the decision to sign Boyd. Leadership — or lack thereof — was an unspoken problem with last year’s team. Boyd already has a close relationship with young pitchers such as Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal, each of whom will spend much of next year recovering from surgeries of their own. Skubal’s flexor tendon injury is most similar to Boyd’s experience last season.
“I hope you can see it in these answers,” Harris said of Boyd’s intrinsic value. “The passion and the depth of thought in these answers are everything we want for our young pitchers because we know it’s going to help them.”
Many of Boyd’s visions of grandeur — bringing a championship to Detroit, restoring energy around Tigers baseball — are things he has said before. This is what makes Boyd, well, Boyd. He’s an eternal optimist in a world where the opposite is cool.
“I know everybody wants to make a big splash and go make big signings, and those are great,” Boyd said. “But if we all can get a little bit better, and the guys in between the white lines (get) better, (if) we can get everything else outside the white lines better, if we can all make marginal gains, who knows what the outcome is gonna be?”
(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Cody Stavenhagen is a staff writer covering the Detroit Tigers and Major League Baseball for The Athletic. Previously, he covered Michigan football at The Athletic and Oklahoma football and basketball for the Tulsa World, where he was named APSE Beat Writer of the Year for his circulation group in 2016. He is a native of Amarillo, Texas. Follow Cody on Twitter @CodyStavenhagen
