Fried Enters Cy Young Award Conversation

On April 17, Max Fried’s ERA had ballooned to 7.71. The baby-faced, unfailingly polite and thoughtful pitcher had just labored through five rocky innings against the Houston Astros – the team he had carved up in the 2021 World Series – and was continuing to struggle mightily with his command, control, and ability to pitch deep into games.

Considering his co-ace Spencer Strider had just been declared done for the season with an elbow injury and free agency was looming, this uncharacteristically sloppy start could not have happened at a less opportune time.

Speed ahead to late June. Over the past couple months, the most gifted Jewish ballplayer of the modern era has been so overpowering, simply unhittable at times, that he now has a chance to be the first Jewish pitcher to capture the Cy Young Award since Steve Stone received the prestigious honor following his 25-win season for the Baltimore Orioles in 1980. Fried’s recent string of shutdown performances, which began with a three-hit shutout of the Miami Marlins on the second night of Passover (his fourth career “Maddux” shutout of under 100 pitches), helped steer the Atlanta Braves back into contention in the NL East standings and remain squarely in the mix for October baseball.

“I saw a guy that right out of the gates got off to a little bit of a slow start and has settled right back into being Max Fried the rest of the way,” remarked New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone a couple hours before Fried pitched six innings of one-run ball in his most recent start against the Yanks this past Sunday. “He’s one of those guys that going into the season you talk about that’s probably going to be in the Cy Young mix, year in and year out, it seems the last several. To me, it seems like he’s been throwing that way now for the better part of a couple months now and he’s in the middle of another outstanding year. One of the game’s best.”

Pitching against the best team in baseball and a possible World Series opponent at sultry, hitter-friendly Yankee Stadium in front of a sold-out crowd — he’s such a big deal in New York’s Jewish community that his signed jersey in the team’s souvenir store goes for $500 — Fried delivered a performance befitting a Cy Young candidate by only yielding a half-dozen hits without issuing a single walk in the Braves’ 3-1 win to take the marquee interleague series and put the five-game skid further in the rear view mirror.

“Definitely feel like I was able to command the ball a little better,” said Fried afterwards. “It was a hot one, so just trying to do my best to attack and get back in the dugout as quickly as possible. I just felt like it was a really great game.”

The most consistently effective pitcher in the NL over the past five years, the one with the everyman physique and golden arm, delivered a near-masterpiece against an imposing Yankees lineup, albeit one without sluggers Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo. With his seven-pitch arsenal, Fried induced a succession of routine grounders and harmless fly balls – none of which left the yard — while sprinkling in four strikeouts, including two of AL MVP front runner Aaron Judge.

He’s one of those guys that going into the season you talk about that’s probably going to be in the Cy Young mix, year in and year out, it seems the last several. To me, it seems like he’s been throwing that way now for the better part of a couple months now and he’s in the middle of another outstanding year. One of the game’s best.

After Fried got outfielder Alex Verdugo to ground into a rally-killing double play to end the sixth on his 87th pitch, the Braves’ bullpen blanked the Yankees for the final three frames as their ace improved to 7-3 with a 3.00 ERA.

Earlier in the month, Fried was actually far more overpowering against the Yanks’ longtime rival Boston Red Sox as he punched out a career-high 13 batters. Fried, who used a heavy dose of his nasty old-school 12-6 curveballs on that June 4th evening, commented afterwards: “I think it was just more of the location on a lot of them. Just happened to be one of those nights where I was getting swings and misses rather than weak contact. You just kind of take what the game gives you and just try to embrace a little bit more of a swing-and-miss game.”

The Boston performance was a departure from how things played out in Fried’s prior outing, a similarly dominating one, in which he induced a career-high four double plays over eight scoreless frames against the Washington Nationals on May 28.

All told, Fried should get a long look to represent pitching-rich Atlanta at next month’s All-Star Game. Going into Sunday’s matinee outing in New York, Fried, who since his 2017 rookie season has been the third winningest pitcher in all of baseball behind future Hall of Famers Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander, had a 2.00 ERA over his last 10 starts – although it bears mentioning that he wasn’t particularly sharp against the Orioles and Dodgers, both World Series contenders.

“I have no idea how the All-Star thing is going to shake out,” Fried said Sunday afternoon. “But I know we have a lot of deserving guys that I hope make it to [Arlington].”

As for the NL Cy Young, whether he receives the coveted hardware later this year may largely hinge on if his teammates, Reynaldo López and Chris Sale, replicate their scorching first halves. Together, the trio of top-of-the-rotation starters has kept the Braves afloat amidst the issues befuddling the lineup and devastating injuries to Strider and reigning NL MVP Ronald Acuna, Jr.

“I would say that the clubhouse is the same that it’s always been,” the 30-year-old southpaw Fried told MLB Network in a live interview last week. “We’re a loose bunch. We love to have fun, but we know when it’s game time, it’s time to go out there and win. We haven’t been playing our best, but we’ve always kind of hit a little bit of a rough stretch in the middle of the year. It’s a long year and we know that we want to be firing in the second half.

“We’ve got over half a season left, that’s a lot of time.”

As June melts into July, the talk of Fried’s potential looming departure – and chance to land his first big-time contract as this winter’s most prized pitcher on the market — has begun to heat up. That question, as to whether his post-2024 plans have been on his brain, inevitably came up in the MLB Network segment, to which Fried responded, “No. We’ve got so much time left in the season. I haven’t even thought about it.”

Over the next few months, Braves fans surely will.