Fifteen games on Wednesday, and the slate was unkind to anyone leaning on low run environments. The model had two totals edges that cleared our bar — both unders, both wrong. The moneyline side came up empty as well, not because we avoided the market but because nothing cleared 5 percentage points over the market price. The final ledger: 0-2 on totals, 0-0 on moneylines. That's a losing day, and the runs that beat us weren't flukes — they were real offense in games we thought would stay quiet.

No money was on the card Wednesday. The edges that cleared our threshold lived entirely on the leans board — tracked, not staked. Here's how those tracked edges graded out.

The Leans

• CLE @ BAL — Under 8.5 | Final: CLE 5, BAL 9 | Total: 14 runs | LOSS. This one wasn't close. Baltimore turned what looked like a controlled pitching environment into a nine-run night. The under needed the game to finish somewhere near the line; it finished 5.5 runs above it. No excuses on this one — the offense was real.
• LAA @ BOS — Under 9.5 | Final: LAA 6, BOS 4 | Total: 10 runs | LOSS. This one stings more because it was actually a reasonable result — ten runs on a 9.5 line is just one over, and the game was tight enough that a single defensive play flips it. Still a loss by the rules of the market. The Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox combined to push it just far enough.

Two leans tracked, two losses. No money was at risk, but the misses go on the board just the same.

The DFS slate scored 454 players, and we had projections on 225 of them. The range was enormous — from a 47-point day at the top to -8.8 points at the bottom. That spread tells you something about how chaotic a 15-game Wednesday can get.

Top Scorers

• Jackson Merrill, San Diego Padres — 47.0 DK pts | 4-5, 2 HR, 6 RBI | Our projection: 7.46. That's the number that defines the day. We had Merrill in a reasonable range for a mid-card hitter, and he delivered the kind of line that wins large-field GPPs outright. There's no model adjustment that turns 7.46 into 47 — this was an outlier performance, and whoever rostered him at the right salary range had a very good Wednesday.
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Los Angeles Dodgers — 35.4 DK pts | 7.0 IP, 10 K, 1 ER | Our projection: 22.54. A miss in absolute terms, but a directionally correct one. We had Yamamoto as one of the higher-ceiling pitchers on the slate and he rewarded the trust — 10 strikeouts in seven innings of one-run ball is a genuine ace line. The gap between 22.54 and 35.4 is real, but this is the kind of underestimate we'll take.
• Christopher Morel, New York Mets — 30.0 DK pts | 3-4, 1 HR, 3 RBI | Our projection: not available. No projection on Morel for Wednesday, so there's nothing to grade — he put up a strong line and we can note it without crediting a call we didn't make.
• Will Warren, New York Yankees — 27.9 DK pts | 6.0 IP, 8 K, 1 ER | Our projection: 17.03. Similar story to Yamamoto in structure — we liked Warren, the direction was right, and the actual output beat our number by a meaningful margin. Eight strikeouts in a one-run start is a quality performance that rewarded rostering.
• Otto Lopez, Miami Marlins — 27.0 DK pts | 2-3, 2 RBI | Our projection: 7.02. Lopez is the hitter version of the Merrill story on a smaller scale. Our projection was modest; he delivered roughly four times it. The Marlins are not typically generating DFS value at the top of the board, which probably kept his ownership manageable.

Where We Hit

Yamamoto and Warren are the honest best-calls of the day — both were identified as high-floor pitchers, both delivered. Merrill technically belongs on this list too, but 7.46 projecting to 47 points is less a hit and more a reminder that two-homer, six-RBI days are not in any model's regular distribution. We'll count it as a directional correct on the hitter side while being clear that nobody predicted the final line.

Where We Missed

• Cristopher Sanchez, Philadelphia Phillies — Projected: 19.86 | Actual: 5.5 DK pts | 6.0 IP, 3 K, 6 ER. Six earned runs is a bad start by any measure, and a projection near 20 points reflects an expectation of run prevention that didn't materialize. The strikeout total (3) was also well below what the projection assumed.
• Jake Bennett, Boston Red Sox — Projected: 19.32 | Actual: -2.0 DK pts | 5.3 IP, 2 K, 6 ER. Negative DraftKings points means the earned runs outpaced every positive contribution on the pitching line. Bennett's start also contributed directly to the LAA @ BOS total going over — the six runs he allowed were the engine behind a game that just cleared our under.
• Foster Griffin, Cleveland Guardians — Projected: 16.61 | Actual: -8.8 DK pts | 2.3 IP, 4 K, 8 ER. The worst miss on the board. Eight earned runs in 2.1 innings explains the -8.8 score, and Griffin's short outing would have torpedoed any lineup that counted on him for innings. This one also connects directly to the CLE @ BAL over — Baltimore's nine-run night was built at least in part on Griffin's struggles.

Three pitchers projected between 16 and 20 points combined for -5.3 DK points on the day. That's a bad cluster, and it's worth noting that all three were starters who allowed six or more earned runs. On a day where the pitching projections at the top (Yamamoto, Warren) performed, the middle of the pitcher tier was a problem.

The two under losses and the three blown pitching projections share a thread: mid-rotation starters underperformed badly, and that drove runs in games the model expected to stay quiet. Sanchez, Bennett, and Griffin were all projected as competent-to-solid starters in the 16-20 DK point range — the kind of pitcher who gives you five or six innings without crisis. None of them did that. When three starters in that tier each allow six or more runs, it inflates totals across the card and punishes anyone positioned for low-scoring games.

The takeaway isn't that we should stop projecting mid-rotation starters — it's that the variance in that tier is wide enough to warrant more caution when building under leans around them. Yamamoto and Warren showed the ceiling; Sanchez, Bennett, and Griffin showed the floor. The distance between those outcomes is substantial, and it matters for how we frame totals confidence going forward.

On the DFS side, Merrill's 47-point day is the kind of game that shifts weekly projections and reminds you that the biggest GPP winners usually come from a player in a zone the model didn't fully anticipate. That's not a flaw to fix — it's a feature of the format. The job is to identify the range correctly often enough that the hits accumulate. Wednesday was a rough day for that project, but the direction on Yamamoto and Warren shows the framework isn't broken.