Today's matchup
Kirby is on the road against Detroit Tigers on the Saturday, September 26, 2026 slate. He shows up on 6 boards — earned runs (100/100, #1), hits allowed (100/100, #1), walks allowed (84.9/100, #5), strikeouts (14.9/100, #20). We've got him at 1 on the earned runs 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
0 starts, 2-5, 3.32 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 40.2 innings. He's struck out 48 over that span, against 17 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
Kirby 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
Kirby has 4 strikeouts in 4.7 innings across his last 5 starts, a 7.7 K/9, with a 1.93 ERA over that stretch and 4 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
Kirby has 48 strikeouts and 17 walks in 40.7 innings this season — 10.6 K/9 against 3.8 BB/9, a 2.8-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
Kirby has made 45 starts this season, averaging 0.9 innings with a 3.32 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 0 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
Kirby is averaging 1.0 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 1.0 and about 16 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.
Where he lands across our boards
Kirby was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: earned runs graded 100/100 while outs recorded came in at 0/100. 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, Kirby 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.