The Cubs wouldn’t have offered Matthew Boyd a two-year, $29 million contract if they weren’t confident that he had strong potential going into his first full season coming out of Tommy John surgery.
The tricky part was, however, they only had 11 major-league games with the Guardians, spanning the last month and a half of the regular season and a playoff run into the American League Championship Series, to make that determination.
“You never know exactly. It was a little bit of an unusual background,” Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said, alluding to Boyd’s injury history.