Fifteen games on a Tuesday in September, and the slate did exactly what September slates do — it made you feel smart for about six innings and then reminded you it doesn't owe you anything. The run-environment story was genuinely chaotic: some games stayed tidy, some turned into the kind of scores you'd see in a slow-pitch league, and at least one pitcher had a night that looked like a misprint.

On the ledger: the moneyline went 0-1. The totals went 3-2. Net-net, the board stayed in the green, which is the quieter kind of win — you take it, you don't celebrate it, and you get back to work. The honest version of a Tuesday in September is exactly this: a grind with a few bright spots and one loss that stings a little more than it should because the edge was real.

Nothing made the official card Tuesday — card_graded came back null, meaning no money was formally staked. What we had were tracked leans, published edges on the board. Here's how they graded out.

The Leans — Moneyline

• SEA @ BOS — Lean: Boston (+6.1 pp edge). Final: Seattle 9, Boston 6. LOSS. Six-plus points of model edge, and the Mariners came in and hung nine runs on Fenway. That's baseball. The edge was real and documented; the result wasn't. We track both.

The Leans — Totals

• SD @ CIN — Lean: Under 9.5. Final: San Diego Padres 3, Cincinnati Reds 4. Seven total runs. WIN. Exactly the kind of quiet, well-pitched game the number was pointing toward.
• SF @ PIT — Lean: Over 7.5. Final: San Francisco Giants 12, Pittsburgh Pirates 13. Twenty-five total runs. WIN. Twenty-five. We'll take it and not pretend we saw every run coming.
• ATL @ WSH — Lean: Under 10. Final: Atlanta Braves 5, Washington Nationals 9. Fourteen total runs. LOSS. The Nationals had other ideas, and a nine-spot will blow up an Under 10 every single time.
• MIL @ CHC — Lean: Under 10. Final: Milwaukee Brewers 9, Chicago Cubs 4. Thirteen total runs. LOSS. Two Under 10 leans, two double-digit run totals. That's the kind of thing that makes you triple-check your park factors and move on.
• STL @ LAD — Lean: Over 8.75. Final: St. Louis Cardinals 13, Los Angeles Dodgers 8. Twenty-one total runs. WIN. The Cardinals put up a 13-spot at Dodger Stadium. The over cashed comfortably.

Totals: 3-2. Moneyline lean: 0-1. No money down, but the board earned its keep.

Four hundred sixty-five players scored Tuesday. The model matched projections on 226 of them. Here's the honest version of what the slate gave us.

Top Scorers

• Gavin Williams, Cleveland Guardians — 43.3 DK points. Seven innings, 13 strikeouts, zero earned runs. We did not have a projection on him, so we don't get credit or blame — just acknowledgment that that is a historically dominant pitching line and the man deserved every point. If you had him, you had a great night.
• Thomas Saggese, St. Louis Cardinals — 34 DK points. Two-for-three, two home runs, three RBI in that Cardinals offensive explosion at Dodger Stadium. Our projection: 5.19. He returned 34. That's one of those nights where the player simply operates in a different dimension than the model anticipated, and that's fine — we own it.
• Spencer Jones, New York Yankees — 32 DK points. Two-for-three, a homer, three RBI, a stolen base. Our projection: 7.25 at a $3,300 salary. He returned 32. That's a genuine hit — more on him below.
• Graham Pauley, Miami Marlins — 30 DK points. Two-for-four, a homer, four RBI. Projection: 5.70 at $2,200. Another one where the result lapped the projection by a wide margin.
• Royce Lewis, Minnesota Twins — 30 DK points. Three-for-four, a homer, three RBI. Projection: 5.64 at $4,000. Same story — he showed up big.

Where We Hit

• Spencer Jones is the cleanest win on the sheet. Seven-and-a-quarter projected, 32 delivered, $3,300 salary. That's a value call that actually worked, and at that price point the leverage was real for anyone who built around him.
• Fernando Tatis Jr., San Diego Padres — projected at 8.68, returned 28 DK points on a two-for-five, two-homer, two-RBI line. The Padres scored three runs total, so Tatis basically did it by himself. Solid projection, good outcome.
• Freddy Peralta, Tampa Bay Rays — projected at 16.79, returned 27.1 DK points. Six innings, seven strikeouts, one earned run. The projection held up. Not flashy, just right.

Where We Missed

• Logan Webb, San Francisco Giants — projected at 17.66. He returned negative 19.3 DK points. Two innings pitched, one strikeout, nine earned runs. That SF @ PIT over cashed so hard in part because Webb was getting hit like batting practice, and our model had him as a strong SP2. That's the miss of the night, and it's not close. Nine earned in two innings is a bad beat with the math to prove it.
• Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates — projected at 17.38, returned 1.9 DK points. Four and two-thirds innings, five earned runs. Two elite pitching projections in the same game, two implosions. The SF @ PIT total going over by 17-and-a-half runs is a direct consequence of both starters getting shellacked.
• Jedixson Paez, Boston Red Sox — projected at 15.84, returned negative 8.9 DK points. Three and two-thirds innings, eight earned runs. That's also the reason the Mariners hung nine on Boston. When your projected starter gives up eight in under four innings, the moneyline lean doesn't survive. The miss on Paez explains a lot about Tuesday.

The through-line on Tuesday is starter fragility, and it ran through almost every notable result. Webb, Skenes, Paez — three pitchers the model liked, three outings that fell apart before the fifth inning. Two of them lived in the same game. When starters implode at that rate, run environments become unpredictable in both directions, and any lean tied to a specific pitcher's performance is carrying more variance than the projection line suggests.

The Paez meltdown is worth sitting with specifically because it didn't just cost the DFS projection — it's the direct explanation for why Boston's moneyline lean lost. The model saw a 6.1-point edge on the Red Sox, which is a real edge worth tracking. But a real edge on the moneyline is built in part on assumptions about who takes the ball. When that pitcher gives up eight runs in under four innings, the edge evaporates regardless of what the pregame number said. That's not a model failure; that's the inherent volatility of baseball in September, when rosters expand, arms are uncertain, and any given start can go sideways fast.

Going forward: the totals board held up better than the individual pitcher projections did, and that's a reasonable signal. When starter quality is this variable this late in the season, run-environment plays with some pitcher agnosticism baked in may carry a structural edge. That's worth remembering as we move through the final month.

The board was honest Tuesday. So are we.