DETROIT -- Matthew Boyd was an out away from qualifying for his first win of the year, and a pitch away from disaster. His fifth and final inning of Wednesday’s 7-5 Tigers loss to the White Sox might as well have been a microcosm of his four starts this season.

“Matty needed to go out there and give us a shutdown inning,” manager Ron Gardenhire said, “and he couldn't get out of the inning.”

Boyd was in a bases-loaded one-out jam after Edwin Encarnación’s 66.5 mph grounder resulted in no outs and no throw, as Tim Anderson’s wide turn off an unguarded third base left Niko Goodrum with no play. Gardenhire had sidearming right-hander John Schreiber warming in the bullpen but stuck with his No. 1 starter.

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Two balls later, Boyd had a mound visit from pitching coach Rick Anderson as he tried to avoid walking in a run with ex-teammate James McCann at the plate.

“The only time you’re getting in trouble is when you’re coming out of your delivery,” Boyd said Anderson told him. “He was right.”

McCann’s ensuing 107.8 mph line drive was the hardest ball the White Sox hit off Boyd all afternoon, and it nearly pulled Boyd out of the threat. The ball went right to Goodrum, whose flip to Jonathan Schoop barely missed doubling off José Abreu.

Instead of escaping with an inning-ending double play, Boyd had to face White Sox rookie sensation Luis Robert.

“I fell behind to the point that bases are loaded and we have two outs, and there's no place to put a guy with a lefty on deck,” Boyd said. “Luis Robert hits lefties pretty well. I probably should've expanded the zone or something on him, but he's a good hitter.”

Said catcher Grayson Greiner: “We had attacked hard with fastballs his first two at-bats. And with a big situation there, with the bases loaded, wanted to start off with something offspeed.”

The pitch wasn’t bad, a knee-level slider. Robert barely missed a grand slam to the depths of Comerica Park’s cavernous right-center field. The 383-foot opposite-field drive instead went for a go-ahead bases-clearing double.

“I think if you look at the replay, it's kind of in the very bottom outside part of the zone,” Greiner said. “That guy, he's just really strong and a really good hitter. He was able to get it out there.”

Boyd’s next slider, three pitches later, hung over the middle of the plate, and Nomar Mazara’s 376-foot double over center fielder Harold Castro’s head drove in Robert and ended Boyd’s afternoon.

“It’s tilting sideways, kind of going across the zone rather than down in the zone,” Gardenhire said of the slider. “At times it comes out really good and he gets on top of that thing and it bites to the ground. And at other times, he gets underneath it and it becomes like a flying saucer.”

Boyd (0-2) finished with seven runs on seven hits over 4 2/3 innings. Almost all the damage bookended his outing, starting with back-to-back home runs from Anderson and Eloy Jiménez and ending with the aforementioned doubles. The collective damage bumped Boyd’s ERA from 9.20 to 10.24, highest among qualified Major League starters, through four starts of what will likely be a 12-start campaign. Add in his final 17 starts from last season, and he has a 6.44 ERA with 33 home runs and 144 strikeouts over 116 innings.

Boyd spent the offseason, Spring Training and Summer Camp working on his curveball and changeup. Most of the damage against him this season has come off his fastball and slider, the workhorses of his repertoire. The spin rate on his four-seam fastball, which was in the top quarter of Major League pitchers last year at 2,383 rpm, according to Statcast, was in the bottom half this season, at 2,285 rpm, entering Wednesday. His slider spin rate is also down, though he has almost the same swing-and-miss rate on it compared with last year. 

Boyd said that he got into bad habits before camp when he began chasing metrics, as he put it, with his fastball movement. He said he has also struggled to maintain a consistent arm angle.

“That's something as simple as getting on the side of my fastball a little bit,” Boyd said. “Those are the things that we've been working through. Today it was a lot better. I haven't seen the numbers yet, but I can tell from the flight of my baseball and the shape of the slider that things were better. There were times I came out of it. 

“That's my battle right now, and that's what I'm working through. I'm going to continue to get better at it. I promise everybody out there, including my team, I will be better from this, and I'm going to continue to work.”