Season line
11 starts, 1-6, 7.40 ERA, 1.51 WHIP, 45.0 innings. He's struck out 32 over that span, against 20 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 18 strikeouts in 23.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 7.0 K/9, with a 4.70 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 32 strikeouts and 20 walks in 45.0 innings this season — 6.4 K/9 against 4.0 BB/9, a 1.6-to-1 ratio. That walk rate is the risk in every projection on him. Free passes run up pitch counts, and a short outing caps the strikeout and outs numbers no matter how favourable the lineup looks. His floor is genuinely lower than his stuff suggests.
What his floor looks like
Max has made 11 starts this season, averaging 4.1 innings with a 7.40 ERA across them. In the 11 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 5 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 4.3 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 6.0 and about 81 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
Max's high-water mark was Sunday, August 2, 2026 against STL: 5 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
The number on Max is about tonight, not about him. Strip out the name and the model is asking one question: what does this specific lineup do to this kind of arm, in this park, for as many batters as he's likely to face? That gets scored against every other starter on the slate. The combination math is proprietary and re-tuned every week. The grading isn't — it's all public, including the misses.
What we'd flag
Books don't price every player — coverage tops out around 87% even for confirmed starters, so "no line" here usually means no book posted one rather than a gap in our data. Lineups change late, and an afternoon projection can be stale by first pitch. And the model is tuned across hundreds of graded outcomes, so one game tells you nothing about whether it's working.