Matthew Boyd's 20th-Century Weapon Has Kept Him Ahead of Hitters in 2025

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © John E. Sokolowski-Imagn Images

It wouldn't even have crossed the mind of the 20th-century pitcher to try to beat you with nothing but speed and movement. The very best hurlers in the league in any given period—the Tom Seaver or Nolan Ryan type, with overpowering velocity at their disposal—might go right after hitters, but few of them had arsenals deep enough or control fine enough to always beat hitters that way, even at a time when most opposing lineups had a couple of hitters who would clear the fences just once a year.

Thus, the most successful and praiseworthy pitchers in baseball would mix up their arm angles on you. Some had a specific pitch they threw from a slot distinctly different than that from which they threw the rest of their repertoire. Some would drop down unexpectedly in particular moments, when they felt the opposing batter was seeing them too well. This was not the exclusive demesne of junkballers, either. Seaver himself did it. So did David Cone, a generation later. John Smoltz did it. Varying one's arm angle was considered a viable (and often vital) way to deceive hitters and keep them on the defensive.

It's become vanishingly rare, over the last 20 years. Some notable hurlers (Rich Hill, Clayton Kershaw, and Nestor Cortes, most famously) have dabbled with it, but the trend of the modern game is toward careful engineering and optimization of deliveries. Repeating your delivery is more prized than ever, and that means working from the same slot as much as possible. Advancements in our understanding of spin and other movement effects have allowed pitchers to create bigger differentials in movement between their offerings, so coming from different spots is less essential. In fact, the conventional wisdom has come to be that changing one's slot only gives away information to the hitter.

In 2025, though, the Cubs' All-Star starting pitcher has defied that convention. Matthew Boyd is dropping down on his slider more all the time—and it's part of how he's stayed one step ahead of the league all year.

Boyd has thrown his slider from a lower arm angle than his fastballs for the last few years, but the gap between the heaters and the slide piece has grown this year—and grown as the year has gone on, too.

One might worry that this would make it too easy to distinguish the slider from the heat out of the hand, and Boy'd's whiff rate on the slider is down this year—but that's just part of the story. Here's the other part:

Batted-Ball Data, Matthew Boyd Sliders, 2024-25

• 2024: 82 MPH exit velocity, 21° launch angle
• 2025: 78.5 MPH, 1°

The median batted ball against Boyd's slider this year is a very weak ground ball. Widening the lens, of course, the results also justify his change, because he has a 2.61 ERA in 148 innings of work. 

Let's take a look at this in action, and see why it's so effective. In his last start, Boyd got Brice Turang out on a ground ball with a first-pitch slider in his first at-bat. Here's a pitch-by-pitch look at the second time the two saw each other. Boyd started Turang with another slider.

Turang laid off this pitch, barely, but that's the kind of reaction you love to get from a hitter on the first pitch of an at-bat. An 0-0 swing should be an aggressive cut, or none at all; Boyd had Turang feeling very uncertain.

He then tried the outside corner with a four-seamer, but missed.

That pitch is working to the same side of the plate as the slider, but on an entirely different vertical plane. Since the slider is a sweepy-looking pitch, it's weird for the hitter to see the fastball play right in the same horizontal lane, even a foot and a half higher. Boyd was down 2-0 in the count, but he'd put some tricky things in Turang's way.

When is a 2-0 sinker down the middle a good pitch? Only when it's been set up exceptionally well. Turang was waiting for a fastball in that zone, but he still mishit it. Why? Because Boyd had made it so hard for him to know what his pitch would look like when it came.

Here are his release points for all three pitches in the sequence, side-by-side-by-side.

There's so much funk in that first delivery (the slider), not only in that his arm is a bit lower, but in the way he strides slightly more across his body, helping create the angle for the pitch he's executing. This tweak is why Boyd throws the slider less often to righties this year, because it's a change conducive mostly to throwing the pitch to the first-base side of the plate and with deceptive sweep, but it's also why his whole ensemble has been so effective.

By giving hitters such disparate looks, he disrupts the process of most guys throughout the league. The modern hitter is being optimized, too. They're working off the Trajekt machine, which can tailor the ball's flight to individual pitchers and pitches and even sync up video to simulate working against that hurler—but which can't be set to throw from two or three different places while mimicking one pitcher. Forcing batters who work relentlessly to find a small release window within which to track the ball to, instead, widen their field and see all his knees and elbows gives Boyd the edge.

Not every pitcher has this much feel for the craft. Even some of those who do prefer to use it to hone especially precise location and command of their stuff, rather than to maximize deception. As Boyd gets set for his 26th start of the season Tuesday, though, his success this year is testament to the fact that the old ways of stumping great hitters still work.

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[Development DL]

Luis Tiant is calling to say ;

Bien dicho, sabio de la biomecánica.

 

With his multi arm angle , HOF resume .