Not on the current slate
AJ hasn't been scored in 44 days — his last matchup was against Chicago White Sox on Wednesday, September 30, 2026. A gap that long usually means an injury, a minor-league option, or a roster move rather than a rest day. Everything below is his most recent real production, not a projection.
Season line
0 starts, 5-3, 3.66 ERA, 1.23 WHIP, 96.0 innings. He's struck out 94 over that span, against 42 walks. This is the baseline the matchup adjusts from — the model starts here and then asks what the specific lineup he's facing does to strikeout arms, how the park plays, and how deep he's likely to go.
He throws right-handed
AJ throws right-handed, which is the ordinary case and means fewer wild swings in the lineup he faces. Opposing managers aren't restacking against him the way they would a left-hander, so his projection moves more on the quality of the lineup than on its handedness. What does move it: how deep he's been going lately, and whether the lineup in front of him strikes out.
His last 5 starts
AJ has 4 strikeouts in 5.7 innings across his last 5 starts, a 6.4 K/9, with a 1.59 ERA over that stretch and 5 walks. Strikeouts are the one pitcher market where our model has found real, graded room — projected workload and the specific lineup he draws move that number more than a season-long rate does. Start-by-start detail is in the log below.
Strikeouts and control
AJ has 96 strikeouts and 45 walks in 98.0 innings this season — 8.8 K/9 against 4.1 BB/9, a 2.1-to-1 ratio. That walk rate is the risk in every projection on him. Free passes run up pitch counts, and a short outing caps the strikeout and outs numbers no matter how favourable the lineup looks. His floor is genuinely lower than his stuff suggests.
What his floor looks like
AJ has made 66 starts this season, averaging 1.5 innings with a 3.58 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 0 times. That ratio is the honest read on his floor, and it's what separates an arm worth projecting on the outs board from one whose good starts are unpredictable enough that the market prices them better than we do.
How long he goes
AJ is averaging 1.0 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 2.0 and about 18 pitches a night. He's not going deep, and that caps the strikeout and outs projections no matter how good the matchup looks — you can't strike out hitters you don't face. Expected batters faced is one of the bigger inputs to his score for exactly this reason.
A long gap since his last start
AJ hasn't started in 44 days. That's the single most useful warning on a pitcher's page, and it's the model's weakest spot. A gap that long usually means an injured-list stint, and a first start back is often on a strict pitch limit that no stat line reveals — books frequently don't post an outs line at all in that spot. Our projection is built on his healthy workload, so it will overshoot a shortened rehab start. Read any projection here with that in mind until he's stretched back out.
How the model reads him
AJ's score rates the matchup in front of him — the opposing lineup against his handedness, expected batters faced, the park and the weather — normalized 0–100 against the slate and graded against the box score. The weighting is ours and re-tunes weekly; the record is public. For AJ specifically, he's coming off a 44-day gap, so treat the projection as a ceiling.
The full method, and the season-wide graded record, is on how MatchWiz works.