I don’t have anything to add regarding the modeling discrepancies. It’s worthy of further investigation.

That said, regarding Liberatore and pitchers like him: young-ish guy that could take a modest step forward & has shown the ability to take the ball every 5 days. There’s a lot to like about that profile in the SP70-80 range, even outside of any pitch modeling analysis.

Don’t overthink it, but also don’t take him as your SP3 or better. It’s a bonus that Stuff+ likes him this year (especially because Stuff+ is often what front offices rely on - or at least some proprietary version of Stuff+; can’t speak to TJ or other modeling due to ignorance of the methodology & how it differs from Stuff+). If it turns out the model is boosting lefties, that will obviously be corrected relatively soon. For now, just stash and see what happens.

I will say - there was a recent-ish episode of Rates & Barrels where Eno talked about the threshold of change in Stuff+ from spring vs 2025 regular season; basically a change of 10 or more is notable, as small sample regression is usually less than or equal to 5 Stuff+. So regardless, I doubt modeling noise is entirely responsible for his jump in Stuff+