He’s Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Boyd

I started writing this article just before the playoffs began, and I framed it to myself as a trailer for an early-2000s romantic comedy. I thought Matthew Boyd and the Cleveland Guardians fit the rom-com formula surprisingly well. After his second breakup with his ex (the Tigers), Boyd was hurt (recovering from Tommy John surgery), unemployed (a free agent), and short on suitors (unsigned well into the season). When he had his meet cute (signed a contract) with the Guardians, they were successful (best record in the AL) but something was missing (starting pitching). Sparks flew instantly. Boyd pitched to a 2.72 ERA in eight starts. Cleveland won six of those eight games.

Now, the Guardians are just a baseball team, standing in front of a Boyd, asking him to start in the ALDS. Replace Boyd with Kate Hudson and make him a journalist instead of a baseball player, and you’ve got your movie. About a Boyd. To All the Boyds I’ve Loved Before. You get it.

Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for the rest of you), my colleague Kiri Oler came out with an excellent piece not so long ago that just so happened to use a Kate Hudson rom-com as a framing device. I was delighted that two different writers thought to write about Kate Hudson on a website that usually couldn’t have any less to do with Kate Hudson, let alone the fact that we both thought to do it in the same week. At the same time, I was disappointed I’d spent so much time coming up with “Boyd” puns for nothing.

Thankfully, that setback turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Freed from the constraints of a formulaic genre, I realized I never should have reduced either Boyd or the Guardians to a cliché. Tropes exist for a reason; when used properly, they’re a handy literary device. And yet it’s how far this specific playoff pitcher and this specific playoff team stray from any sort of conventional script that makes them both interesting.

A little over three months ago, Boyd’s future was completely up in the air. He was a year removed from Tommy John surgery. He hadn’t pitched a qualifying season since 2020 or a full qualified season since 2019. He was 33 years old, and injuries had been the defining theme since his age-30 season in 2021. Now, plenty of free agents manage to land a contract during an offseason in which they are recovering from surgery; Tyler Mahle and Brandon Woodruff are a couple of recent examples. The teams that signed them, the Rangers and Brewers, respectively, were willing to accept the risks to reap the potential rewards. Unfortunately for Boyd, no team had been willing to take such risk on him, or at least no team had been willing to take enough of a risk, financially speaking, for Boyd to put pen to paper; no one offered him a major league deal this past offseason.

Finally, on June 29, 2024, Boyd inked a major league deal with the Guardians. Six weeks later, he finished his rehab and returned to a big league mound. Less than two months after that, he’s going to be the ALDS Game 2 starter for the second-best team in the American League. That’s not usually how it works.

The Game 2 starters for the other three teams that earned a first-round bye are 2024 All-Star Cristopher Sánchez, blockbuster trade deadline acquisition Jack Flaherty, and one of the highest-paid pitchers in baseball, Carlos Rodón. All three of them have started in the postseason before. Boyd has not. Boyd has also never been an All-Star, and he hasn’t been part of a blockbuster trade since he was one of the prospects the Blue Jays sent to the Tigers for David Price in 2015. I can’t say with 100% certainty that Boyd isn’t one of the highest-paid pitchers in baseball, but that’s only because the details of his 2024 contract have not yet been reported, which effectively tells you everything you need to know. If Boyd were a bigger deal (and if he had signed a bigger deal), more people would care that his guaranteed salary on RosterResource is still listed as TBD.

Still, the most unusual thing about Boyd as a Game 2 starter is surely the fact that he wasn’t even on a team for the first three months of the season. I looked back at every Game 1 and 2 starter from every postseason series of the past 15 years, and I only found two others who were unsigned on Opening Day: Dallas Keuchel of the 2019 Braves and Pedro Martinez of the 2009 Phillies. Unless Boyd is hiding a Cy Young Award, some All-Star appearances, and a strong postseason résumé at the back of his closet, he isn’t comparable to Keuchel or Martinez. On the contrary, Boyd’s résumé is so sparse that it allows me to draw a parallel between Keuchel and one of the greatest pitchers of all time without sounding ridiculous.

To be clear, none of this is to say that Boyd is undeserving of this opportunity. Through eight starts and 39 2/3 innings pitched in the regular season, he put up a 2.72 ERA and 3.29 FIP. From his debut on August 13 to the end of the season, his 0.9 WAR led the Guardians pitching staff. If Boyd had maintained that level of performance over 32 starts, his 3.6 WAR would have ranked ninth among AL pitchers, in between Framber Valdez and Yusei Kikuchi. I’m not saying he would have kept up that pace, necessarily; I’m just trying to contextualize how well he pitched in the eight starts he did make.

So how did the Guardians end up in a position where (a) they finished with the second-best record in the AL and (b) their no. 2 starter is a midseason pickup from the side of the road? Entering play on June 29, the Guardians had the best record in the AL. Their playoff odds had just about tripled since Opening Day. They were flying high, but they had one glaring weakness. Their starting rotation had a 4.42 ERA, 12th in the AL; that group’s 4.72 FIP ranked last, as did its 2.3 WAR. Shane Bieber was done for the season. Gavin Williams had been on the IL all year. Triston McKenzie and Logan Allen were struggling badly. Meanwhile, Cleveland’s biggest offseason signings were Ben Lively and Carlos Carrasco. Carrasco was just eating innings. Lively was playing well, but it was hard not to think he was pitching over his head. The only starter who looked like he genuinely belonged on the top team in the AL was Tanner Bibee. The Guardians took a chance on Boyd because they were running out of options.

They got Williams back from the IL in July. They promoted rookie Joey Cantillo later that month. The only starter they added at the deadline was an injured Alex Cobb. Those three, along with Bibee, Lively, and Boyd, made up the Guardians rotation in September. Needless to say, the front office did little to address a key area of weakness. The rotation finished the season ranked 24th in ERA, 24th in FIP, and 27th in WAR.

So, the question persists: How did this team get so far with so little from its starters? The answer, of course, is the bullpen. The Guardians were one of two teams to finish with more bullpen WAR than rotation WAR in 2024. (The Marlins were the other.) In this age of openers and expanded bullpens, it’s becoming more common for at least one or two teams to finish with more bullpen WAR than rotation WAR in a given year, but it remains exceedingly rare for a good team to get more value out of it bullpen than its rotation. Dating back to at least World War II, only 19 teams have finished a season with more bullpen WAR than rotation WAR, and only two of those teams made the playoffs. Heck, only two finished above .500: the 2024 Guardians and the 2020 Braves. That makes this year’s Guardians the only team to ever make the playoffs in a full season with more bullpen WAR than rotation WAR:

If you prefer more traditional stats in your fun facts, the Guardians also have the largest difference between their starters’ winning percentage (.467) and relievers’ winning percentage (.778) of any team to ever make the playoffs (since at least 1945). They have the highest relievers’ winning percentage and the lowest starters’ winning percentage of any postseason team in that time period. And this isn’t just some team that snuck into the playoffs by the skin of its teeth; this is a division-winning club with a first-round bye. Like I said, Boyd is an unconventional playoff pitcher, and the Guardians are unconventional playoff team.

If I were sticking with the rom-com theme, I’d have to find a way to bring about a happy ending. Boyd and the Guardians would have to pull off a resounding victory over his former team and their newer, younger, flashier southpaw in the ALDS. Of course, I can’t guarantee that. After winning Game 1 on Saturday, Cleveland’s chances of winning the series are at 72.6%. We all know this Tigers team has come back from far worse odds.

Everything that makes Boyd and the Guardians such an unusual story also makes sustaining their success seem like a high-wire act. Boyd has been the beneficiary of both good defense (+2 OAA while he was pitching) and bad defense (four of the 16 runs he allowed were unearned) to help keep his ERA under 3.00. Many of his peripheral numbers are still impressive, especially his 3.10 xERA and 29.7% whiff rate, but it’s crucial to remember we’re working with a minuscule sample size. Boyd’s 4.85 career ERA across more than 900 innings of work looms large compared to his 2.72 ERA in less than 40 innings this season. His 8.0% HR/FB ratio is well below his 13.4% career average, and his 0.66 GB/FB would rank second to last among qualified pitchers. While he might be able to keep the ball in the yard at Progressive Field, it’s easy to imagine him running into trouble at a different ballpark in a future series. What’s more, PitchingBot and Stuff+ agree his overall stuff is well below average and the worst it’s been since at least 2020.

Meanwhile, the Guardians might have had the lowest bullpen FIP in baseball, but they also had the widest negative gap between their 2.57 ERA and 3.30 FIP (-0.73). Few would doubt that this team has a phenomenal ‘pen. We saw as much in 4 1/3 scoreless innings from Cade Smith, Tim Herrin, Hunter Gaddis, and Emmanuel Clase on Saturday. Still, that doesn’t mean Cleveland’s bullpen hasn’t been the recipient of good fortune. The Guardians won 92 games in 2024 because their relievers put up the highest bullpen winning percentage of any team since 1976. The slightest slip-up from the arm barn could spell disaster.

So no, this isn’t a rom-com. The characters aren’t archetypes. Their story hasn’t been predictable. The final act hasn’t been scripted yet. And as much as I love romance, Kate Hudson, and a good, safe comfort watch, I’m looking forward to Matthew Boyd’s first-ever playoff start even more.