Season line
31 starts, 15-6, 3.60 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 172.2 innings. He's struck out 158 over that span, against 45 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 left-handed
Foster is a left-hander, and that matters more for a starter than it does for most hitters. Lineups get built specifically to attack lefties — managers stack right-handed bats against them — so the lineup he draws on a given night swings his projection further than a righty's would. The model prices the actual lineup rather than a season-long rate for exactly that reason. A stacked righty lineup is the spot where his strikeout projection comes down hardest.
His last 5 starts
Foster has 26 strikeouts in 21.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 11.1 K/9, with a 6.43 ERA over that stretch and 6 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
Foster has 167 strikeouts and 45 walks in 176.3 innings this season — 8.5 K/9 against 2.3 BB/9, a 3.7-to-1 ratio. That's strong control, and it does more for his projection than the raw strikeout number does. Walks are the fastest way to shorten a start — an arm that doesn't issue them gets deeper into games, which is what the outs and strikeout lines are really pricing.
What his floor looks like
Foster has made 33 starts this season, averaging 5.3 innings with a 3.57 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 8 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
Foster is averaging 4.6 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 6.0 and about 83 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
Foster's high-water mark was Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at CWS: 7 strikeouts over 2.7 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.
How the model reads him
Every arm on the slate goes through the same math, Foster 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.