Boyd can't contain Twins as Tigers drop finale

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Matthew Boyd slider that C.J. Cron sent to the Target Field batter's eye wasn’t a terrible pitch. It was just below the strike zone before Cron golfed it 410 feet to center field, albeit over the middle of the plate rather than on the backdoor corner where Boyd and catcher John Hicks wanted it. Still, as home runs go, the fourth-inning drive was one Boyd can accept as an outcome.

“He hit my pitch,” Boyd said. “Hat’s off to him.”

“The more times I personally face these guys, the more comfortable you’re going to be, and I think I’ve seen that pitch before," Cron said.

The problem for Boyd, and his eventual downfall in the Tigers’ 7-4 loss to the Twins on Sunday, were the two baserunners the left-hander put on beforehand. Miguel Sano’s double made him the fourth Twins leadoff batter to reach base in as many innings, then Boyd hit Max Kepler to spoil a lefty-lefty matchup. The combination made Cron’s 21st homer of the season a three-run dagger in the Tigers’ hopes of taking the weekend series.

• Box score

Though Boyd gave up only four hits over six innings, he allowed seven earned runs for the first time since May 16, 2017. Five of those runs scored on two homers. Two of those runs reached base without a ball put in play, including Cron’s sixth-inning walk ahead of Jonathan Schoop’s scorched line-drive homer over the left-field fence.

“Walks kill you,” Boyd said, “and that’s what happened.”

While the home runs are typical of Boyd’s season, the extra baserunners are not. He looked like a pitcher who hadn’t taken the mound in a week, having traveled to Seattle this week to be with his wife, Ashley, for the birth of their second child. He was struggling with his command, and the Twins were relentless in taking advantage.

“It wasn’t the hits that beat him,” Hicks said. “They hit a couple home runs. It was the walks and the hit by pitch that got him in trouble.”

Boyd had walked 13 leadoff batters this season before walking the first Minnesota hitter in each of his first three innings. He was on his way to another when Sano laced a 3-2 pitch into the left-field corner for a double to begin the fourth. Though Cron’s sixth-inning walk came with one out, it also came after Boyd had put Cron in an 0-2 count, just the third time this season he has allowed a hitter to escape such a hole with a pass.

“He got thinking about his mechanics and where his hand is on the ball, got thinking that way rather than [thinking about] getting the hitters out,” Tigers manager Ron Gardenhire said. “That’s one of the things he fought today.”

Once Schoop capitalized on a hanging slider with a 114.9 mph drive (per Statcast) down the left-field line, Boyd had given up his 32nd home run this season, the most by a Tigers pitcher since Mike Maroth allowed 34 in his 21-loss season in 2003, the single-season record for the Comerica Park-era Tigers. Only Mike Leake (34) and former Tigers ace Justin Verlander (33) have allowed more home runs than Boyd this year among Major League pitchers.

It’s a byproduct of today's game, especially against the Twins, whose 253 homers this season lead the Majors by a wide margin. No coincidence, then, that Boyd fell to 0-5 with an 8.64 ERA and nine home runs allowed in his last five starts at Target Field, where he had been 3-0 with a 3.33 ERA in his first four visits.

“You have to take it for what it is,” Boyd said. “They’re up in the league as a whole, quite significantly. You want to miss bats; I feel like I’ve done that. [The home runs] have come at times where some of them are just as simple as just putting them on the other side of the plate, or just not reading swings like I want to.

"It’s very controllable in terms of making that adjustment, and you just go from there. It’s nothing where you’re sitting there going, ‘OK, I need to create a fifth and sixth pitch, got to do something different.’ Unfortunately, that’s what happened, and that’s kind of been my Achilles' heel.”

Gardenhire can deal with the home runs allowed.

“He’s a strikeout guy,” Gardenhire said of Boyd, “and he goes for it. Sometimes, when you do those things, you’re going to miss some and they’re going to get some. That’s an area he has to improve, and I know he knows he can. It’s about quality pitches in bigger situations. But he’s pretty good. He’s a good pitcher, and he’s got great stuff.”

Still, Boyd’s struggles dampened the optimism from his seven innings of one-run ball last weekend at Tropicana Field. Between two homers, five walks -- double his walk rate per nine innings -- seven strikeouts and a hit batter, Tigers fielders had plays against just 12 of the 22 batters Boyd faced Sunday.

The Tigers would have loved to have had plays on the two balls the Twins hit out, but the bigger worries were the baserunners who didn’t have to hit their way on.