Today's matchup
Today it's Chicago White Sox for AJ, at home. He shows up on 6 boards — earned runs (100/100, #1), hits allowed (100/100, #1), walks allowed (100/100, #1), fantasy points (0/100, #8). We've got him at 1.1 on the earned runs board. That's one of the stronger spots on the board today. Open any board row for the full breakdown of what's driving it.
Season line
0 starts, 5-3, 3.59 ERA, 1.23 WHIP, 95.1 innings. He's struck out 93 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 3 strikeouts in 5.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 5.4 K/9, with a 10.80 ERA over that stretch and 4 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 94 strikeouts and 42 walks in 96.0 innings this season — 8.8 K/9 against 3.9 BB/9, a 2.2-to-1 ratio. That's around league-typical control — enough to work deep when the lineup cooperates, not enough to bail him out of a bad matchup.
What his floor looks like
AJ has made 64 starts this season, averaging 1.5 innings with a 3.66 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 0.9 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 2.0 and about 17 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.
Where he lands across our boards
AJ was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: earned runs graded 100/100 while strikeouts came in at 0/100. Same player, same game, same opposing arm — different questions. A spread that wide usually means the matchup favours one kind of outcome over another, and it's the clearest argument for reading the board that matches what you actually care about.
How the model reads him
The number on AJ is about tonight, not about him. Strip out the name and the model is asking one question: what does this specific lineup do to this kind of arm, in this park, for as many batters as he's likely to face? That gets scored against every other starter on the slate. The combination math is proprietary and re-tuned every week. The grading isn't — it's all public, including the misses.
What we'd flag
Books don't price every player — coverage tops out around 87% even for confirmed starters, so "no line" here usually means no book posted one rather than a gap in our data. Lineups change late, and an afternoon projection can be stale by first pitch. And the model is tuned across hundreds of graded outcomes, so one game tells you nothing about whether it's working.