Not on the current slate
Max hasn't been scored in 34 days — his last matchup was against Houston Astros on Monday, July 20, 2026. A gap that long usually means an injury, a minor-league option, or a roster move rather than a rest day. Everything below is his most recent real production, not a projection.
Season line
20 starts, 9-1, 2.68 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 111.0 innings. He's struck out 121 over that span, against 41 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
Max 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
Max has 26 strikeouts in 26.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 9.0 K/9, with a 2.42 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
Max has 121 strikeouts and 41 walks in 111.0 innings this season — 9.8 K/9 against 3.3 BB/9, a 3.0-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
Max has made 20 starts this season, averaging 5.5 innings with a 2.68 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 11 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
Max is averaging 5.5 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 7.0 and about 89 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.
A long gap since his last start
Max hasn't started in 36 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.
His best start in the log
Max's high-water mark was Sunday, June 14, 2026 at PIT: 9 strikeouts over 6.0 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
Max'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. For Max specifically, he's coming off a 36-day gap.