Today's matchup
Hayden is hosting Seattle Mariners on the Saturday, August 15, 2026 slate. He shows up on 6 boards — outs recorded (96.5/100, #5), walks allowed (60.9/100, #13), fantasy points (38.5/100, #15), earned runs (23.8/100, #23). We've got him at 17.8 on the outs recorded 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
3 starts, 2-0, 3.86 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, 18.2 innings. He's struck out 12 over that span, against 6 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
Hayden 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 3 starts
Hayden has 12 strikeouts in 18.7 innings across his last 3 starts, a 5.8 K/9, with a 3.86 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.
Where he lands across our boards
Hayden was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: outs recorded graded 96.5/100 while strikeouts came in at 14.7/100. 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, Hayden 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.