Drop Down, Back it Up, Slide It In: Matthew Boyd Keeps Baffling Batters With His Breaking Ball

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

How many times have you heard a color commentator say it, over the years? It was a favorite saw of Steve Stone at the peak of his considerable powers, and the holster is always unfastened so that Jim Deshaies can whip it out when needed, too, so if you're a Cubs fan of almost any recent vintage, it's probably very familiar: If pitchers could master the backup slider and reliably reproduce it, they'd do it all the time.

Well, maybe Matthew Boyd has cracked that code. After a full decade in the majors and through several iterations, he's meandered right into an awfully interesting slider this season. That pitch has, at times in the past, been his signature, anyway, but it's fascinating to see the way the pitch has changed in 2025. It's firmer, and it's moving less, and it's really sort of a cement-mixer. Hitters, however, can't do a blessed thing with it.

Last year, there was far more active spin on Boyd's slider. A solid 53% of the spin on that pitch helped create movement, which is why it got a little sweepy and began to resemble his bigger, much slower curveball at times. This season, that active spin is down to 28%. He's spinning the ball right through the heart of the zone, too. This is not, ordinarily, where you want a red spot to show up on the location heat map for a breaking ball. 

Yet, Boyd is thriving with the pitch, getting righties and lefties out with it, just spinning that backup slide-piece into the heart of the zone without repercussions. How? Well, for one thing, he's dropping way down on it, which seems to be throwing people off.

With almost a sidearm slider, batters are expecting way, way more horizontal movement than they're actually getting. As a result, they're either locking up on it or jumping at the ball—and now, we can document that in a neat new way.

Baseball Savant's new suite of swing detail metrics give us insight into the shape and timing of batters' swings. It's obviously of the greatest use when analyzing hitters, but we can also use it to examine the way hitters react to particular pitchers and their offerings. For instance, we can take all pitchers and their individual pitch types, and plot the average attack angle (the upward angle of the sweet spot of the bat, relative to the ground, at the intercept point for that swing) and attack direction (the horizontal angle of movement of that same spot on the bat at the same moment) against them.

Aha. We've got something interesting here. 

Because looking at attack angle and direction from the pitcher's side eliminates the quirks and quiddities of any given hitter's swing, the two metrics move in almost perfect unison for hurlers. If guys tend to have a greater pull-side attack direction against a given pitch type from a particular pitcher, they almost uniformly also have a steeper attack angle. It's just the nature of swings, if you take them as a composite. There aren't many things in baseball that are as tightly correlated as attack direction and angle on specific pitch types.

There are three truly notable exceptions, here. One is Fernando Cruz's splitter, which we've long known is a unicorn of a pitch; he kills spin on it so well that it's almost a knuckleball. Another is Tyler Rogers, whose dirt-scraping release point just plain weirds people out. The other is Boyd, on his slider. Look at how far he lies outside the very tight cluster that is all these other pitchers and their pitch types, including the rest of his own.

Even if you isolate sliders, Boyd stands out. There just aren't other pitchers who tamp down the average attack angle on their slide-piece while inducing hitters to get so far around the ball.

The low release angle and the funky movement—the lack of movement, really—has lefties surrounding the ball, by accident. It has righties trying to flatten out their swings to find what they're reading as something more like a sinker. It has everyone swinging just a little bit wrong. That's helped Boyd miss more bats with the pitch than you'd expect, based on the attack angle hitters are reaching:

But it's also just forcing a lot of weak contact. The average exit velocity against Boyd's slider this year is 77 mph, an anemic number that reflects the confused swings it's drawing from batters.

Can he keep this up all season? That's impossible to guess, just by using these numbers. The dropdown angle is an interesting wrinkle, but as the scouting reports get updated league-wide, hitters might lock onto it a bit. They might even be able to train their eyes not to expect the big sweep implied by the spin they see and the arm angle. For now, though, Boyd is enjoying being a step ahead. As long as he can stay healthy, the Cubs will continue to reap the rewards of his unique veteran savvy.

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