Today's matchup
Cal is hosting Los Angeles Angels on the Sunday, August 23, 2026 slate. He shows up on 6 boards — outs recorded (71.6/100, #13), walks allowed (68.8/100, #8), strikeouts (47/100, #9), fantasy points (39.9/100, #9). We've got him at 14.1 on the outs recorded board. Open any board row for the full breakdown of what's driving it.
Season line
9 starts, 5-4, 3.13 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 77.2 innings. He's struck out 54 over that span, against 22 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
Cal 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
Cal has 22 strikeouts in 24.3 innings across his last 5 starts, a 8.1 K/9, with a 1.11 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
Cal has 54 strikeouts and 22 walks in 77.7 innings this season — 6.3 K/9 against 2.5 BB/9, a 2.5-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
Cal has made 26 starts this season, averaging 3.0 innings with a 3.13 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 6 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
Cal is averaging 4.7 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 7.0 and about 70 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.
His best start in the log
Cal's high-water mark was Tuesday, July 28, 2026 at TB: 7 strikeouts over 5.3 innings, 1 earned run. One start doesn't set a projection — the model works off the blend of his recent work against the specific lineup in front of him — but it does show the ceiling when the matchup lines up.
Where he lands across our boards
Cal was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: outs recorded graded 71.6/100 while earned runs came in at 15.6/100. 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
Every arm on the slate goes through the same math, Cal included. Opposing lineup, handedness, expected batters faced, park, weather — weighted, combined, and normalized 0–100. We keep the weighting to ourselves and re-tune it weekly on real results. What we don't keep is the record: every projection here is graded against the box score at the line the market offered.
What we'd flag
Three caveats worth carrying. Not every player gets a posted line — book coverage runs to about 87% for confirmed starters, so a blank line is the market's silence, not ours. Lineup changes land late enough to strand a projection published hours earlier. And judging any of this on a single night is meaningless; the model is tuned on hundreds of settled outcomes.