What Do the Cubs See in Matthew Boyd?

The Chicago Cubs made their first big splash in free agency early this week by signing left-hander Matthew Boyd to a two-year, $29 million deal. The deal comes as a surprise to most fans. Why? Well, Boyd is 33 years old, another lefty, and not the high-level pitching addition that tops most fans' wishlists. However, there may be more than meets the eye with Boyd.

How Matthew Boyd Evolved to Become More Effective

Matthew Boyd underwent a change with the Cleveland Guardians in 2024. It's not easy to see with the naked eye or in the traditional stat sheets. Rather, the changes can be seen in the underlying data provided by Baseball Savant.

Dating back to 2021, Boyd threw with a 31-degree arm angle and heavily leaned on a fastball-changeup-slider combination. Boyd rarely threw his curveball though it was a quite successful outlying breaking pitch. The southpaw doesn't feature high fastball velocity, so his heater was getting beaten up and his rarely thrown sinker was getting crushed, leading to struggles on the mound.

Fast forward to 2024, and Boyd has completely changed his arsenal. He's throwing his changeup more than ever before and using that offering, mixed with his fastball and sinker, to keep hitters off balance with deception. Furthermore, Boyd now features a 26-degree arm angle and is getting more horizontal break on his slider. In fact, his slider and curveball look similar and share a tunnel (the path the baseball takes to the plate). That tunnel is forcing batters to guess. When they do, they have to hope the slider doesn't cut hard horizontally or the curveball doesn't break sharply. Either way, those pitches are deceptive and have about a five mph difference in velocity. 

The Cubs On Tap podcast offered a further breakdown of these changes: