Everything else on a baseball card has a wall of randomness in front of it. A hitter gets four at-bats and a great one goes 0-for-4 all the time. A team total runs through a starter, a bullpen, the weather, and a dozen defensive plays. But a starting pitcher? He walks out to face a lineup you already know, and for five or six innings the game runs through his arm. That's why pitcher props are where a matchup model earns its keep — there's less noise to fight and more signal to score.
So we score all of it — and then we're honest about which ones are worth betting. One is: the strikeout gap. The rest we publish as graded transparency, because the book prices them about as sharply as we do. Here's how to read the whole slate.
What counts as a pitcher prop
Five markets, one arm. Each has its own board, updated every slate and graded against the box score:
- Strikeouts — how many batters he sits down. The headline market, and the only one with a real edge.
- Outs recorded — how deep he goes. Quiet, but it matters for DFS and it feeds our team run model.
- Earned runs allowed — the damage he gives up. The backbone of the moneyline + team-total model.
- Hits allowed — the contact he surrenders to this lineup.
- Walks allowed — his command versus their patience.
- Fantasy points — his projected DraftKings score, built up from the boards above.
How the model scores a starter
It isn't a name game. Every starter is scored the same way — an ace and a fill-in judged on the exact matchup, not their reputation. The projection is built from:
- His own stuff — strikeout rate, earned runs per batter faced, and control — blended across recent form and the full season, so a hot month counts without erasing the track record.
- The exact lineup he faces: how each of those nine hitters performs against his handedness, weighted by where they bat in the order.
- Park and projected workload — how many batters he's likely to face before the bullpen takes over.
Those pieces combine into one number per market, and the model re-tunes itself every week against how its past calls actually landed. If you want the full method, it's on the how it works page.
The one edge: strikeout gaps
The strikeout board is our sharpest play. The reason is simple: the book sets a K line mostly off a pitcher's name and his season strikeout number, then nudges it. We score the specific lineup in front of him — a whiff-prone group is a strikeout magnet, a contact-heavy one quietly shrinks the number — so we catch the spots the posted line hasn't caught up to.
When our projection gaps far from the line — about a strikeout and a half or more — that disagreement has been profitable across a full-season backtest, and it holds up when you split the data in half to check it isn't a fluke. Most of the value lands on the under of an inflated ace line: the market pumps a big-name arm's number up, and the real matchup doesn't support it. Those gaps become our strikeout Plays of the Day, each graded at the line it posted at, with the season record sitting right next to it.
A small gap isn't a play — the edge lives in the wide disagreements. Scan the board for the biggest gaps between our projected K's and the posted line; those are the ones we'd actually back.
The rest grade efficient — and that's the point
Hits allowed, walks, earned runs, outs recorded — we've backtested them, and the book prices them well. Earned runs and hits are lower-variance than strikeouts, so there's less room between a sharp projection and a sharp line. We don't pretend otherwise. Those are transparency boards: our number set beside the market, graded in the open, no play attached.
But they're not idle. The earned-runs and outs projections are the engine of our team run model — the moneyline and team totals, where the edge actually is, and the first-inning (NRFI) model, which keys on each starter's early-inning form. So the sharp pitcher projections earn their keep whether or not a standalone prop is bettable — they just do it one level up, at the team run total.
Pitcher DFS
For daily fantasy, the pitcher fantasy board composes a DraftKings score from the tuned pieces — strikeouts, outs, earned runs, hits and walks run through the DK scoring formula — so it inherits all their sharpness instead of guessing at points directly. The lever is value: points per thousand dollars of salary. A workhorse who racks up K's and goes deep is where DFS rosters are won, and you can drop one straight into the lineup optimizer.
How to actually use it
Start on the strikeout board and look for the widest gaps between our projection and the line — those are the plays, and they show up in the Plays of the Day too. Use the other pitcher boards as research and as DFS inputs, not as leans — there's no systematic edge to press there. And if you want the team-level bet a great matchup implies, follow it to the team totals.
Everything here is a research signal from the model, graded in public — not betting advice, and no outcome is guaranteed.