Twelve games on a Monday slate, which is either a gift or a trap depending on how your pitchers behave. Ours behaved badly. The totals board went 1-1 — one clean cover, one game that decided nine runs was two too many — and the moneyline column sits at a pristine, meaningless 0-0-0 because we had nothing staked there. No card today. The leans tracked. Some hit, one of them beautifully. The DFS slate, meanwhile, was the kind of night where you'd need a strong drink and a sense of humor to review your pitcher selections.

That's the honest version of Monday. Let's get into it.

No money was down Monday. Nothing cleared the bar for the card — no moneyline side at five or more points of edge over the market, nothing on totals that earned a stake. That's a disciplined pass, not a failure. The board stays clean when the signal isn't there.

The Leans

We tracked two totals edges Monday, and they went 1-1.

• SD @ CIN — Lean: Under 9. Final: SD 5, CIN 0. Total runs: 5. WIN. This one wasn't particularly close. A combined five runs on a nine-run total is the kind of result that makes the model feel smarter than it probably is. The lean held up cleanly.
• PHI @ ARI — Lean: Over 8.5. Final: PHI 2, ARI 1. Total runs: 3. LOSS. Three runs on an 8.5. That's not a near-miss — that's a game that had no interest in cooperating. We tracked it, it missed, we move on. The lean was wrong.

Leans are tracked edges, not money. The record is what it is: 1-1 on totals, 0-0 on the moneyline, nothing on the card.

Three hundred fifty-one players scored Monday. We matched 187 of them to projections. Here is the honest summary: the hitters were spectacular and the pitchers were a disaster. Let's start with the good news, because there's a lot of it.

Top Scorers

• Alex Bregman, Chicago Cubs — 44 DK points. 3-for-6, three home runs, four RBI. Our projection: 7.54 points. Bregman at $5,900 on DraftKings putting up 44 points is the kind of value column you screenshot and keep. We projected him at under eight — he gave you nearly six times that. At that salary, anyone who rostered him had a significant night.
• Daylen Lile, Washington Nationals — 37 DK points. 3-for-3, two home runs, four RBI. Our projection: 7.91 points. Lile's salary wasn't listed in our data, but the production was undeniable — a perfect 3-for-3 with two balls leaving the yard. The model had him just under eight points. He nearly quintupled that.
• Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers — 35.1 DK points. Seven innings, eight strikeouts, zero earned runs. Our projection: 25.72 points. This is the one pitcher on the board we're proud of. deGrom at $8,800 was our highest-projected arm of the slate, and he delivered — sharp, deep, dominant. If you faded him and rostered one of the names below, tonight hurt.
• Randy Arozarena, Seattle Mariners — 35 DK points. 4-for-5, one home run, four RBI. Our projection: 7.01 points. Five times the projection. Arozarena was locked in Monday — four hits, a homer, and four driven in. His salary wasn't in our data but the output was first-ballot best-ball material.
• Ryan Jeffers, Minnesota Twins — 34 DK points. 2-for-3, two home runs, four RBI. Our projection: 6.93 points, salary $4,900. At $4,900, Jeffers was the cheapest name on this list by a wide margin and nearly doubled the production of the next cheapest option relative to price. Two home runs and four RBI from that salary tier is a DFS cheat code.

Where We Hit

Three names stood out as model calls that paid off:

• Alex Bregman — projected 7.54, scored 44. The projection was conservative by a mile, but relative to the field's expectations at that price, landing Bregman in your lineup was the call of the night.
• Daylen Lile — projected 7.91, scored 37. Same story. The model didn't predict the ceiling, but the underlying case for rostering him at his price held up in the best possible way.
• Randy Arozarena — projected 7.01, scored 35. Five times the number. When a $7 projection becomes 35 DK points, you don't over-explain it — you take the win and acknowledge the model had a reason to be there.

Where We Missed

Now the part that requires the aforementioned strong drink.

• Kyle Harrison, Milwaukee Brewers — projected 15.03 points. Final: 3.2 innings, three strikeouts, nine earned runs. DK score: -10.9. Negative. Double digits in the wrong direction. Nine earned runs in less than four innings is a historically bad outing, and we had him projected as a viable arm at 15 points. That's a miss. That's a significant miss. Own it.
• Elmer Rodriguez, New York Yankees — projected 14.75 points. Final: 3.2 innings, five strikeouts, four earned runs. DK score: 4.8. The projection asked for 15 points worth of starter production. Four earned runs in 3.2 innings gave back nearly everything. Not a disaster on the same scale as Harrison, but a clear miss — the model saw a viable starter and got a short, leaky outing.
• George Kirby, Seattle Mariners — projected 14.65 points. Final: five innings, two strikeouts, five earned runs. DK score: -0.2. Five innings sounds workable until you see two strikeouts and five runs allowed. Kirby's strikeout profile was the foundation of the projection, and he was essentially a non-factor in that department. A near-zero score from a 15-point projection is the quiet bad beat of the pitching staff Monday.

The pattern is obvious: we liked starters Monday. The starters, with one exception, did not like us back.

A few things worth carrying forward from Monday.

First, the card discipline held. Nothing cleared the bar, nothing went on the card, and that's the correct outcome — not a missed opportunity, just a night where the signal wasn't strong enough to stake. The leans split evenly. That's fine. Leans are tracked edges, not guarantees, and a 1-1 night on two moderate-confidence positions is about what you'd expect from a market that prices things reasonably well.

Second, the pitcher projections need honest scrutiny. Three starting pitchers projected in the 14-15 point range combined for a -6.3 DK score. That's not variance — that's a pattern worth examining. The model likely has reasonable inputs on strikeout rate and recent form, but outings that end before the fifth inning with multiple runs allowed are erasing any edge the projection built in. We'll be watching how that resolves over the coming days.

Third, the value hitters were excellent Monday. Bregman, Lile, Jeffers, Arozarena — four names across a wide range of salary tiers delivered enormous DFS production relative to price. The model's projections for all four were conservative, but the underlying roster logic — finding access to upside at manageable cost — held up in the results. deGrom's 35.1-point night on a legitimate 25.7-point projection was the cleanest call of the slate.

Take the pitcher miss seriously. Celebrate the hitter calls appropriately. Come back tomorrow with the same standards.