Today's matchup
Today it's Milwaukee Brewers for Taj, away. He shows up on 6 boards — outs recorded (77.3/100, #3), strikeouts (55.1/100, #6), fantasy points (48.7/100, #11), hits allowed (34.9/100, #24). We've got him at 18.3 on the outs recorded board. Open any board row for the full breakdown of what's driving it.
Season line
22 starts, 9-4, 3.69 ERA, 1.24 WHIP, 126.2 innings. He's struck out 141 over that span, against 53 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
Taj 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
Taj has 29 strikeouts in 31.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 8.4 K/9, with a 3.77 ERA over that stretch and 15 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
Taj has 141 strikeouts and 53 walks in 126.7 innings this season — 10.0 K/9 against 3.8 BB/9, a 2.7-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
Taj has made 22 starts this season, averaging 5.8 innings with a 3.69 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
Taj is averaging 6.3 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 7.0 and about 99 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
Taj's high-water mark was Wednesday, July 1, 2026 at HOU: 11 strikeouts over 5.0 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.
Where he lands across our boards
Taj was scored on 6 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: outs recorded graded 77.3/100 while walks allowed 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
The number on Taj 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.