Today's matchup
Justin is hosting Pittsburgh Pirates on the Saturday, September 26, 2026 slate. He shows up on 6 boards — earned runs (72.1/100, #4), outs recorded (61.7/100, #18), walks allowed (58.1/100, #9), hits allowed (53.1/100, #5). We've got him at 1.7 on the earned runs board. Open any board row for the full breakdown of what's driving it.
Season line
1 start, 0-1, 12.27 ERA, 2.18 WHIP, 3.2 innings. He's struck out 1 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
Justin 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.
A long gap since his last start
Justin hasn't started in 180 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.
Where he lands across our boards
Justin was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: earned runs graded 72.1/100 while strikeouts came in at 3.5/100. 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, Justin 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. For Justin specifically, he's coming off a 180-day gap.