Season line
12 starts, 5-6, 2.49 ERA, 1.11 WHIP, 68.2 innings. He's struck out 50 over that span, against 23 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
Clay 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
Clay has 19 strikeouts in 26.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 6.6 K/9, with a 3.81 ERA over that stretch and 9 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
Clay has 50 strikeouts and 23 walks in 68.7 innings this season — 6.6 K/9 against 3.0 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
Clay has made 12 starts this season, averaging 5.7 innings with a 2.49 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 10 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
Clay is averaging 5.7 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 7.0 and about 89 pitches a night. He's going deep enough that the outs and strikeout lines stay live into the seventh, which is where most of the value on those boards sits. Expected batters faced is one of the bigger inputs to his score for exactly this reason.
His best start in the log
Clay's high-water mark was Friday, May 15, 2026 against NYY: 8 strikeouts over 4.3 innings, 4 earned runs. 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.
How the model reads him
Clay's score comes from the matchup, not his reputation. The model weighs how the opposing lineup handles his handedness, how many batters he's likely to face given recent workload, the park, and the weather — then normalizes 0–100 against every other arm on the slate. How those factors are weighted is our own, and it re-tunes weekly against real outcomes. We publish the score and grade it in public; that's the half you can check.
What we'd flag
Read this page knowing what it can't do. It can't show you a line no book posted — coverage peaks around 87% for confirmed starters. It can't see a lineup change that happens after the projection publishes. And it can't tell you anything useful from one game, because the model is only measurable across a season-sized sample.