Season line
21 starts, 8-6, 3.08 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 120.0 innings. He's struck out 134 over that span, against 33 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 left-handed
Payton is a left-hander, and that matters more for a starter than it does for most hitters. Lineups get built specifically to attack lefties — managers stack right-handed bats against them — so the lineup he draws on a given night swings his projection further than a righty's would. The model prices the actual lineup rather than a season-long rate for exactly that reason. A stacked righty lineup is the spot where his strikeout projection comes down hardest.
His last 5 starts
Payton has 38 strikeouts in 30.3 innings across his last 5 starts, a 11.3 K/9, with a 2.37 ERA over that stretch and 7 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
Payton has 134 strikeouts and 33 walks in 120.0 innings this season — 10.1 K/9 against 2.5 BB/9, a 4.1-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
Payton has made 21 starts this season, averaging 5.7 innings with a 3.08 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
Payton is averaging 5.7 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 8.0 and about 87 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
Payton's high-water mark was Friday, August 7, 2026 against ATH: 14 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 Payton 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.