Not on the current slate
CJ hasn't been scored in 44 days — his last matchup was against Cincinnati Reds on Friday, September 25, 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
1 start, 0-2, 5.40 ERA, 1.46 WHIP, 11.2 innings. He's struck out 3 over that span, against 2 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
CJ 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
CJ has 3 strikeouts in 11.7 innings across his last 5 starts, a 2.3 K/9, with a 5.40 ERA over that stretch and 2 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.
How long he goes
CJ is averaging 2.3 innings a start across his last 5 outings, with a high of 5.0 and about 45 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
CJ hasn't started in 46 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
CJ'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 CJ specifically, he's coming off a 46-day gap, so treat the projection as a ceiling.
The full method, and the season-wide graded record, is on how MatchWiz works.