The Chicago Cubs took a gamble in signing oft-injured starter Matthew Boyd prior to the 2025 season on a 2-year, $29 million contract.
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The veteran lefty was coming off Tommy John surgery in mid-2023 and had just gotten back into the swing of things at the very end of the 2024 season. Plagued by an assortment of injuries, he hadn’t thrown over 100 innings in a season since 2019.
But the Cubs’ bet paid off. Boyd was brilliant last season, posting 14-8 record with a 3.21 ERA over 179.2 innings. With ace Justin Steele sustaining a season-ending elbow injury after just four starts, Boyd stepped in to become the Cubs’ ace the rest of the way.
The experts and analysts, however, are not very high on Boyd heading into the 2026 season and have almost unanimously predicted a prodigious fall from grace for the starter.
Boyd blasted with poor ranking
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In a collaborative piece for The Athletic ranking the top 50 starters in baseball, Andy McCullough, Will Sammon and Sahadev Sharma placed Boyd nearly at the bottom of the list. They actually him him tied for 49th.
Per The Athletic:
“Boyd made his first All-Star team in 2025, rewarding the Cubs for their faith in giving him a two-year, $29 million contract after an intriguing eight-start campaign with Cleveland in 2024. ‘Good for a solid, back-end arm,’ one executive said. But many of our panelists were pessimistic about Boyd putting together a repeat. ‘Very good 2025,’ one scout said, ‘but that was his first healthy year since 2020.’”
According to their tier system for the rankings, Boyd falls into the area of a fourth or fifth starter.
The Cubs plan on Boyd being their Opening Day starter and implied ace.
Overall, the Cubs starters rate poorly on this list, with the highest placed Cub being Cade Horton as a tie for no. 40 of the top 50. Newcomer Edward Cabrera comes in at 48, one spot below Boyd. Shota Imanaga and Jameson Taillon are unranked.
This assessment falls in line with MLB projections systems, which don’t view Chicago’s starting pitching in much of a positive light.
Cubs rotation “deep in meh and unexcitement”
Dan Szymborski, the developer of the computer-based ZiPS projection system, blasted the rotation as one “deep in meh and unexcitement.”
Per Szymborski:
“ZiPS sees the Cubs as having a very deep rotation that’s also very deep in unexcitement. There’s certainly some upside here, especially in Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS largely views the team as having a whole lot of broadly average starting pitching options. The good news here is that if Justin Steele has any setbacks, ZiPS likes the team’s replacement options. Even with especially bad luck in the injury department, the computer thinks Javier Assad will be adequate — it has him with an ERA considerably lower than his FIP, though some of that is thanks to the stellar Cubs defense — and that Ben Brown and Jordan Wicks would both be far more acceptable as starters if called into duty than they’ve shown so far. Heck, if Colin Rea or even Connor Noland were forced into starting some games, that wouldn’t be an apocalyptic scenario for the Cubs.”
None of this guarantees the Cubs starters a great, big fail this season. It does raise some concerns, though, that maybe the rotation is not as rock-solid as fans would like to believe. As always, time will tell.
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