Today's matchup
Today it's Chicago Cubs for Taylor, at home. He shows up on 12 boards — runs (56.4/100), total bases (55.3/100), walks (46.9/100), triples (43.4/100). We've got him at 0.5 on the runs board. Open any board row for the full breakdown of what's driving it.
He's in a cold stretch
Taylor is 5-for-38 (.132) across his last 10 games, down from .234 on the season. Slumps this size are mostly noise at this sample — 38 at-bats is a fortnight, not a trend — and the model treats it that way, discounting the cold run rather than writing him off. If the matchup underneath is good, he'll still grade well here. That's a feature, and sometimes it's wrong.
He's a right-handed bat
Taylor hits from the right side, so the platoon math runs the other way from a lefty's. Right-handed bats face right-handed pitching most of the time, meaning his baseline is built against the harder side and a left-handed starter is the upgrade. That's why a righty's score can jump on a day nothing else about the matchup changed. The model weighs his rates against the specific handedness he's drawing rather than a blended season number, which is where a lot of the day-to-day movement in his score comes from.
Floor and ceiling
Taylor has recorded at least one hit in 74 of 121 games he's batted in — 61% — with 21 multi-hit games among them. That's about average — most regulars land somewhere near it.
Home and away
Taylor is hitting .229 at home (53-for-231) and .240 on the road (52-for-217) across the season. There's not much in it, which is the normal case. Home-road splits get talked about far more than they hold up.
How our calls on Taylor have graded
In the 20 games where we ranked Taylor a top-20 hitter matchup, he recorded a hit 11 times — 55%. Middle of the road, which is what most players look like. Every one of those calls was graded against the real box score, misses included.
Where he lands across our boards
Taylor was scored on 12 boards in that matchup, and the spread is the interesting part: runs graded 56.4/100 while stolen bases came in at 7.7/100. 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
Taylor's score rates the spot in front of him, not the name on the jersey. It weighs his rates against the kind of arm he's facing — handedness matters a lot — set against what that pitcher and his bullpen give up, then adjusts for expected playing time, park, weather, and recent form, normalized 0–100 across the slate. The weighting is proprietary and re-tuned weekly; the grading is public, and that's the half that proves anything.
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.