Season line
26 starts, 8-9, 3.38 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 149.0 innings. He's struck out 128 over that span, against 58 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
Michael 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
Michael has 25 strikeouts in 29.7 innings across his last 5 starts, a 7.6 K/9, with a 3.94 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
Michael has 128 strikeouts and 58 walks in 149.0 innings this season — 7.7 K/9 against 3.5 BB/9, a 2.2-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
Michael has made 26 starts this season, averaging 5.7 innings with a 3.38 ERA across them. In the 12 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 10 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
Michael is averaging 5.8 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 6.7 and about 96 pitches a night. He's going deep enough that the outs and strikeout lines stay live into the seventh, which is where most of the value on those boards sits. Expected batters faced is one of the bigger inputs to his score for exactly this reason.
His best start in the log
Michael's high-water mark was Wednesday, July 22, 2026 at ATL: 7 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
Every arm on the slate goes through the same math, Michael 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.