CLEVELAND — Twenty-two hours before he was scheduled to toss the first pitch of the biggest game of his life, Matthew Boyd cried.
He didn’t expect to shed tears, but the more he thought about the opportunity that lies ahead of him and the journey he has traveled to reach this point, the more he realized he couldn’t bury his emotions. He couldn’t pretend that it’s a simple assignment to turn on autopilot and carve through the Detroit Tigers’ lineup in Game 5 on Saturday afternoon without acknowledging the stakes, the crowd and the moment.
“It’s what you want,” Boyd said. “It means you’re alive. It means your heart is beating. It’s all energy. You just use it for good.”
As the league opened the 2024 season, Boyd had shifted into a coaching role in the Pacific Northwest, the manager of his 7-year-old’s softball team and his 5-year-old’s T-ball team. As he completed his recovery from Tommy John surgery, he was without a big-league team and without any certainty that this season would offer him anything more than a pain-free elbow.
His daughter kept asking why he wasn’t pitching. By late June, he was healthy and ready to sign, and when the energy from Cleveland’s dugout during a win in Baltimore spilled out of his TV, he knew he wanted to be a part of it.
Four months later, the Guardians are handing him the ball with their season hanging in the balance. On the other side is his former team, whose rotation he once anchored. His adversary on the mound for Detroit will be his former mentee, Tarik Skubal, who has grown into the best pitcher on the planet.
So as the gravity of the situation struck him on Friday afternoon — a web of storylines somehow colliding to create one, Hollywood-worthy script — Boyd needed a few breaths to collect himself.
“This is what you dream of,” he said. “This is what you want.”
Someone’s season will end on Saturday afternoon. Dejected players will sit in one dugout and stare out at their opponents forming a dogpile on the infield grass.
There’s no greater dichotomy in sports. The line between winning and losing is a fine one, and the consequences for the winner and loser couldn’t be more drastically different. It’s either a beer bash or it’s a funeral. It’s either bass-thumping music that makes the clubhouse carpet vibrate or it’s the silence of a library, with an occasional murmur by someone asking what time locker cleanout is the next day.
One group of players will soak each other in champagne, puff cigars and board a flight to New York City. The other will retrieve their belongings and then book a flight to decompress at a poolside cabana somewhere hundreds of miles south of Detroit or Cleveland.
“You want to be in those games,” said Guardians manager Stephen Vogt. “You’re not in an elimination game if you’re not having a good year.”
Sports spoil us with these possibilities, with winner-take-all games that leave every fan on one end of the emotional spectrum or the other, with zero chance for anything in between. There’s nothing but agony until your team records its 27th out.
It’s grueling, gut-wrenching, stomach-churning and leg-twitch-inducing. It’s the antithesis of the sport’s regular season. And it’s a thing of beauty — horrible, twisted, unforgiving, cruel beauty.
Tyler Freeman tore his oblique muscle, so as he stresses over every pitch as a dugout cheerleader, he has to be careful not to overreact to any strikeout or, say, David Fry’s pinch-hit, go-ahead homer in Game 4. Vogt’s three children all lost their voices screaming for their dad’s team Thursday night. Hunter Gaddis’ dad keeps telling everyone he isn’t nervous, but his son doesn’t believe him.
And fans in Detroit and Cleveland, at Progressive Field and in their living rooms, are drowning in the anxiety while knowing it’s everything they signed up for when they invested in their team in spring training or whenever the bandwagon stopped by their front door.
For Cleveland fans, Friday marked the 76th anniversary of the franchise’s last title. A decisive playoff game is nothing they haven’t experienced. But a Game 5 at Progressive Field on Saturday afternoon is still guaranteed to be remembered fondly or for all the wrong reasons.
You never know which pitch is going to alter the course of the game, and, therefore, the season. It’s the sort of torment that once convinced Terry Francona to order $44 worth of room service ice cream in the middle of the night during the 2016 playoffs. It’s the sort of torture that caused Guardians GM Mike Chernoff to go for a run after Game 3, and to spend the morning of Game 4 at the gym, a manner of channeling boundless nervous energy into something worthwhile.
It’s the pinnacle of sports drama and tension. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.
“We are living and dying with every pitch,” said catcher Austin Hedges. “Whether we show it or not, every single pitch means the world to us. But it’s also the greatest thing ever because you know the risk/reward is so powerful. You know (if) you lose, it’s going to be so heartbreaking.
“But when you win and you do it right, there is no better feeling in the world.”
(Top photo of Matthew Boyd: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)
