Season line
9 starts, 3-4, 3.04 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, 50.1 innings. He's struck out 36 over that span, against 14 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
Zac 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
Zac has 19 strikeouts in 27.0 innings across his last 5 starts, a 6.3 K/9, with a 4.00 ERA over that stretch and 8 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
Zac has 36 strikeouts and 14 walks in 50.3 innings this season — 6.4 K/9 against 2.5 BB/9, a 2.6-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
Zac has made 9 starts this season, averaging 5.6 innings with a 3.04 ERA across them. In the 9 starts we hold detailed lines for, he got through five or more innings 7 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
Zac is averaging 5.8 innings a start across his last 8 outings, with a high of 7.0 and about 82 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
Zac's high-water mark was Tuesday, August 18, 2026 against SD: 7 strikeouts over 5.0 innings, 3 earned runs. 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
Zac's score comes from the matchup, not his reputation. The model weighs how the opposing lineup handles his handedness, how many batters he's likely to face given recent workload, the park, and the weather — then normalizes 0–100 against every other arm on the slate. How those factors are weighted is our own, and it re-tunes weekly against real outcomes. We publish the score and grade it in public; that's the half you can check.
What we'd flag
Read this page knowing what it can't do. It can't show you a line no book posted — coverage peaks around 87% for confirmed starters. It can't see a lineup change that happens after the projection publishes. And it can't tell you anything useful from one game, because the model is only measurable across a season-sized sample.