Tigers' leader Boyd setting optimistic tone

DETROIT -- The ball was a classic Miguel Cabrera swing from his younger healthier years, an opposite-field home run over the vast expanse of right-center field at Comerica Park. But unlike his other Detroit drives, it came off a teammate.

Matthew Boyd could’ve been kicking himself. But given the situation, what the home run means for the Tigers more than himself, his personality wouldn’t allow it.

“It's pretty awesome to see him going opposite field on a line drive on a heater up,” Boyd said after the Monday morning session of live batting practice. “I missed my spot and he punished it, and it's fun to see Miggy do that. And I know what I need to do to be better from that.”

The next morning, as Tigers pitching coach Rick Anderson talked with reporters, he had already spoken with Boyd.

“We talked this morning about a little thing we saw yesterday in his delivery,” Anderson said early Tuesday morning. “He works so hard at his trade, and he's never going to get cheated at what he does.”

When Anderson returned to Detroit last week for Summer Camp, he admittedly didn’t know what condition he’d find his pitching staff in. He knew that Boyd would be in good shape, but he didn’t know about everyone else. Like many pitching coaches around the Majors, Anderson thought he might be racing the calendar to get pitchers ready in a shortened training camp and might need innings-eaters in the bullpen.

“It's been really, really amazing to me what these guys have done,” Anderson said. “I mean, every one of them stayed in shape and kept throwing and it's been really impressive. I was thinking I'd have to come and start from step one like a normal spring and move from that, but they've all come in, in great shape. It has been very impressive.”

For at least part of that, Anderson can thank Boyd.

When some described the break as a test to get ready, Boyd called it an opportunity to get better. He not only practiced that philosophy, shipping his Rapsodo machine from his offseason home in Seattle to Detroit to help him work on his curveball, Boyd relayed that message to teammates. He kept in touch with Jordan Zimmermann, Daniel Norris and other returning starters to trade notes on how they were preparing.

He exchanged group texts with Casey Mize, Matt Manning, Tarik Skubal and Alex Faedo to see how they were handling the layoff.

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“I heard Matt Boyd do an interview and he talked about we don’t get an opportunity after Spring Training to really go work on stuff, because we get thrown into a season,” Mize said Monday. “So it’s kind of been a unique opportunity. We were at Spring Training competing, preparing for a season, but now everything gets shut down and we go back to our hometowns and try to prepare for what we don’t know what’s to come at the time.

“It’s cool, because we really got to work on the things that we didn’t like in Spring Training, the things that we did really well in Spring Training, and kind of hone in on those skills. And so I think that was one of my goals. I tried to make the curveball better and make the fastball command better, things that I didn’t like in Spring Training.”

Said Anderson: “[Boyd] is focused and driven and he's a leader. There's a few instances during the course of a season, 'Hey, Matty, I can't get this one over here, will you help me out?' And he's like, 'I've got you.' He's a leader and whatnot, but he just wants to keep getting better and better and better and be the best, which is a good trait.”

As the Tigers’ rep for the MLB Players Association, Boyd also kept teammates updated to let them know when they felt close enough to some sort of resolution to begin ramping up their work from a bullpen session per week to two or three.

Boyd’s optimism -- on baseball, on the team, on pitching -- has seemingly carried over. For a team that lost 114 games last season, the 60-game schedule is short enough to foster the sense that something unusual could happen, including the Tigers getting off to a hot start and crashing the American League Central race.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen over 60 games,” Boyd said. “The good news is, nobody else does, either. We’re excited about that.”

At the same time, Boyd’s attitude has the potential to set a tone for how to get through the season. He has a health condition, having battled asthma since childhood. He also has a wife and kids that he wants to protect. When the plan for a season was announced, Boyd expressed confidence that teammates will protect themselves on and off the field, a sentiment he reiterated Monday with the release of the 2020 regular season schedule and road trips.

“We'll just take our precautions,” Boyd said. “That means for that hour on the plane that we're going to be around everybody, just keep the mask on. Keep the gloves on. There are ways to stay safe. If that means I'm not going to drink on the airplane or eat on the airplane, well that means I won't do that either. We'll eat when we land, or before [we take off].

“We've just got to adapt. There's no reason to dwell on the way things were, because they're not that way anymore. This is the new normal, and we've got to keep going forward.”