Analysis: Fixing Matthew Boyd
Yesterday afternoon, this clip from Spring Training started making the rounds on Twitter:
At first glance, this video doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. That is, until you realize that the hitter is Jeff Mathis, arguably the single worst hitter in the modern era. However, it all starts to make sense once you see who was pitching.
To say that Matthew Boyd has had a rough few years would be quite an understatement, and to see him give up another home run has unfortunately become par for the course. In fact, in recent years he has arguably become the standard-bearer of the home-run pitch. Not only has he had the highest HR/9 of any qualified pitcher in the league for two years running, but in 2020 he was the only pitcher to average more than two homers every nine innings (2.24). To put this in further context, the next closest rate was nearly half a home run lower (Alec Mills with 1.88), and the distance between him and second place is the same as the distance between second and sixth. Of course, the pandemic season can take a lot of the blame here, but Boyd’s penchant for the long ball is an issue that has far predated 2020.
So what went wrong?
At first, it looked like Boyd was a star in the making. He was taken in the sixth round of the 2013 Draft by the Blue Jays, and he immediately made a name for himself in their organization. He received his first promotion after just 14 innings of work in Class-A Lansing, where he gave up only one run and recorded 12 strikeouts in his 3 starts. He then moved to Class A+ Dunedin, where he would dominate for most of 2014. In his 90.2 innings at that level that season, he put up a 1.39 ERA, averaged more than one strikeout per inning, and had a WHIP under 1.000. This performance quickly sent him off to AA New Hampshire (go Fishercats!), where he struggled early but again found his groove heading into 2015. Through the first half of that season, he posted an insane ERA of 1.10 over 73.2 innings, to go along with 8.9 K/9, 0.4 HR/9, and 0.774 WHIP.
What followed was an emotional roller coaster for Boyd. On June 14th, he would be called up to AAA Buffalo. Just 12th days later, on June 26th, he was recalled by the Blue Jays to make his Major League debut in a spot start against the Rangers. In that game, he had a respectable outing - pitching into the seventh inning and giving up four runs. Unfortunately for him, his next outing against the Red Sox would be an absolute disaster - 6 hits, 7 earned runs, and 0 outs recorded. Naturally, he was immediately optioned back to AAA. Just a few weeks later, he would be traded to Detroit as part of a prospect package for David Price (who would finish second in AL Cy Young voting that year), and he would spend the rest of 2015 and the start of 2016 in limbo between Detroit and AAA Toledo. However, by July 2016, he would make the big league roster for good, posting a respectable 4.53 ERA in 18 big-league starts that year.
Heading into 2017, it seemed like Boyd was poised to have a real shot at becoming a top-of-the-rotation starter for the Tigers. At every previous level to that point, he would face some early growing pains before eventually becoming a dominant force after overcoming them. And now that he was starting to figure things out at the big-league level, it felt like he was about to take that next step. But unfortunately for the Tigers, that next step has still not been taken. In fact, he has seemingly taken some steps back over the past few years.
By all accounts, he has the stuff to be at least an average pitcher in the league. According to Statcast, his fastball velocity is right around league average. Similarly, the spin rate on his fastball has ranged from right around average (55th percentile in 2020) to decisively above average (76th percentile in 2019). Additionally, after being below average through most of his career, he has greatly improved his whiff and strikeout rates - in fact, he was actually one of the best in baseball in these metrics in 2019. Yet despite these positives, Boyd can’t seem to shake his greatest enemy - the barrel. In fact, his barrel rate was in the 19th percentile of pitchers in 2019, and it fell even further to the 12th percentile in 2020.
So the question here is pretty clear: why is it that a pitcher with decent stuff, a demonstrated ability to miss bats, and a slightly-below-average hard hit rate also giving up more barrels and home runs than every other pitcher in MLB? Well, to me, there are three key issues that seem to be holding him back:
Location, Location, Location
When looking at Boyd’s pitch charts over the last three years, one of his main issues becomes abundantly clear: too many hittable pitches in the zone, particularly with his fastball and slider. To illustrate this, take the hexbin charts for both of these pitches below. They show the general location and density of his pitches for 2019-20 and color codes them based on average wOBA value, with darker blue being better and darker red being worse.
Fastball - Location Density and wOBA Value 2019-2020
Slider - Location Density and wOBA Value 2019-2020
It’s easy to see the pattern he’s trying to follow here. Like most modern pitchers, he’s trying to get hitters to chase the high fastball and swing at the slider in the dirt. But the problem here is that way too often, he doesn’t fully commit to the execution of these pitches - and the result is a mistake right over the middle of the plate that usually gets hammered.
Some pitchers have good enough stuff that they don’t have to worry about where they place pitches in the zone, because they’ll still likely get a swing and a miss. Unfortunately for Boyd, he is not one of those pitchers. For the most part, he is working with an average fastball and an ineffective slider (more on that later). In order for him to be as effective as possible with those pitches, he’s got to hammer that slider low and keep that fastball high to keep getting hitters to swing through them. Take these pitch charts from 2018-2020 for example:
Fastball - Location of Hits and Strikeouts 2018-2020
Slider - Location of Hits and Strikeouts 2018-2020
When it comes to his fastball, his putaway pitches largely come from above the strike zone and near the corners. However, once these fastballs start to move down and into the zone, a lot of pink, orange, and purple starts to color the map. A similar thing happens to his slider, except in reverse. When he executes his pitch properly and buries it down and in to righties, it becomes a very effective strikeout pitch. But as soon as it starts to creep up in the zone, it has a tendency to become an 80-MPH meatball.
Of course, some pitches will need to be thrown in the strike zone, and there are more ways to use these pitches than just throwing them high and burying them in the dirt. But the broader point I’m making here is this: the intent with each pitch needs to be more deliberate and the execution on each pitch needs to be better if Boyd wants to start seeing better results on the mound.
Trouble with the Slider
In 2017, Boyd threw his slider 11.8% of the time and his curveball 18.1%. By 2019, those percentages went to 36.1% and 4.0%, respectively. Since making this decisive shift in 2018, he’s been decently effective with his slider. Hitters have hit just .188 against it, only managed a .256 wOBA, and struck out against it 219 times over the last three years. However, just because he has gotten some good results from it does not necessarily mean it’s a good pitch for him.
I realize that I’m probably in the minority in saying that, as he developed the pitch over multiple years at Driveline and he has seen it praised by the likes of Pitching Ninja and the Washington Post. In fact, his slider has become something of a calling card for him. But in reality, it’s a pitch that has been getting away from him - figuratively and literally. According to Statcast, his slider was technically his best pitch in 2018, saving 13 runs for his team. Fast-forward to 2020, and that same pitch is now statistically his worst, costing him 9 extra runs (even with the shortened season) and resulting in an astounding 46.4% hard-hit rate. And when you look deeper into the numbers and his pitch arsenal, you can start to see why.
For one thing, his slider doesn’t, well, slide. On average, his slider had a horizontal movement of just 3 inches in 2020. This was down from 4 inches of movement in 2019, but also way better than 2017, where he somehow managed to have a “slider” that averaged 4 inches of horizontal movement in the wrong direction. To put this in context, only three qualified lefties had less horizontal movement on their slider compared to the average in 2019, and only Trevor Rogers was worse in 2020. Basically, instead of moving laterally like a normal slider, Boyd’s version only moves downward, essentially making a slightly faster version of his curveball with less lateral movement and vertical drop. Thus, you have a pitch that breaks 6.6 inches lower than the average slider, but drops 3.6 inches more - in other words, not really a slider. The clip and the movement analysis below showcases this fairly well:
However, with all of that being said, it must be asked: if he still gets decent results with it, why is this an issue? Well, because it might actually be holding back his pitch arsenal. There’s a reason why Boyd has practically given up his curveball in recent years. I mean, if his slider is basically the same pitch, why bother throwing two versions? But the issue here is that this has left him without a pitch that effectively moves horizontally toward right-handed hitters. This makes his pitches a lot more predictable, as the hitter knows that they are mostly going to be moving in one direction.
If he could somehow redesign his slider to provide more horizontal movement and less drop, it could really open up his options on the mound. Since his fastball and changeup both have pronounced movement to his throwing hand side, having a pitch that darts in the opposite direction with a similar motion to a fastball could do wonders for his deception, especially since his changeup and his slider are thrown at essentially the same speed. Not only that, but having that horizontal movement opens up the opportunity for him to start using his curveball again - both as a slower pitch to keep hitters off-balance and as a pitch with a ton of movement that he could get hitters to chase.
Reliance on the Fastball
While Boyd features five pitches in his arsenal, there is one pitch he relies on far more than any other: his four-seam fastball. In fact, over the past two seasons, half of his total pitches have been fastballs. This kind of reliance on the fastball can be good for certain types of pitchers. If you have an overwhelming four-seam and/or impeccable command of it, it would make sense to put a lot of focus and emphasis on that pitch. However, as I mentioned earlier, Boyd is not that kind of pitcher. He does not have the velocity to routinely blow his fastball by hitters, nor does he have the command to keep hitters on their toes with it. As a result, instead of swinging and missing, hitters tend to wait for him to make a mistake with his fastball and then hit it a long way.
To illustrate this, I pulled up every Boyd pitch from 2019-2020 that resulted in an exit velocity greater than 98 MPH and a launch angle between 25-35 degrees - batted balls that would typically be counted as barrels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, of the 46 such pitches I found for 2019 and 2020, 30 of them came via the fastball, with most of these suffering the same location mistakes discussed earlier.
Fastball - Barrel Locations 2019-2020
As I lightly touched upon regarding his slider, I think Boyd would benefit from some more variation in his pitch selection. In his current form, he is essentially a two-pitch pitcher. However, if he lowered his fastball usage, found a way to get more lateral movement in his slider, and worked in more curves and changeups to work off the fastball, he could get more deception from his pitches and create more uncertainty for the hitter.
Look, I know that Matthew Boyd isn’t going to see this article, but if he ever did, I would want him to know that I’m rooting for him. This article has been a bit critical, but I really do think that he has some good stuff and that he still has a lot of untapped potential at the big league level. Even though things haven’t gone exactly as planned over the past few seasons, I have no doubt that with his work ethic and willingness to experiment, he’s going to find something that works, even if it’s from these suggestions or elsewhere.
I just hope, for his sake, that he finds it sooner rather than later.