In Opening Day Clunker, Matthew Boyd Can't Outguess Nationals Batters

The Nationals pulled off a shocking Opening Day blowout against the Chicago Cubs Thursday, winning 10-4. They chased starter Matthew Boyd in the fourth inning, and tacked on runs via late long balls to put away the much better Chicago club.

For Boyd, the problem was not an inability to miss bats, but a fatal attraction to the Nationals batters' barrels. Five Washington batted balls against Boyd were 103.8 MPH ore harder, including three crucial hits that contributed to their scoring against him. He was a bit lucky that the line wasn't worse, given how hard the visitors were hitting him when they made contact. Some good defense and a bad baserunning play gave Boyd three of the four outs recorded on balls in play.

That wasn't because of a lack of sheer stuff. Boyd's fastball was right in line with last year in terms of velocity, and his changeup, slider and curve all showed similar movement to their norms. In fact, Boyd got whiffs on over half the swings Nationals batters took against him, leading to seven strikeouts.

Washington's plan was extremely guess-heavy; they were locking in and sitting on specific pitches in specific counts and situations. When they were wrong, Boyd fooled them badly and racked up whiffs. When they were right, though, they were all over him.

Boyd got barreled up on a first-pitch fastball to CJ Abrams and on an 0-1 slider to Daylen Lile. He also got burned trying to sneak a fastball past Brady House on a 2-2 count, and Joey Wiemer took advantage of a good but guessable changeup in a 1-1 count to hit a long home run. Boyd doesn't have unusually intense stuff, but he's hard to read and his pitches have a wide variety of movement. What they don't have is unexpected movement. Thus, if you carefully plan to commit to a given pitch type from him and you get it—especially if it's roughly in the location you expect—he becomes hittable. Of course, if you're wrong, you won't merely slightly mishit the ball, but come up empty altogether.

The gameplan worked for the Nationals Thursday. Boyd will have to make some adjustments for his next start, to be less predictable in both sequence and location. This problem isn't entirely new. In the second half of last season, Boyd ran into it somewhat often, and was vulnerable to just this kind of roughing-up. He and Carson Kelly might need to collaborate to develop a different strategy. Last year, opponents had a .620 OPS when either Miguel Amaya or Reese McGuire worked with Boyd, but a .673 mark when the southpaw was paired with Kelly. Opponents hit 16 oif their 22 homers on the year off Boyd in the starts in which he and Kelly worked together.

It's just one game, and one loss. For Boyd and the Cubs, though, every game has to be precious this year. The loss Thursday served notice that while much of what he does still works, he'll have to make further adjustments to stop the league from guessing right often enough to hurt him.