Yankees' Max Fried fuses talent, hard work into a groove that's tough to beat
Max Fried of the New York Yankees pitches during the first inning against the San Diego Padres at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Max Fried warms up to “Work” by Gang Starr.
It’s an ode to the grind, and the lyrics somehow manage to be both humble and brash, with the ‘90s hip-hop duo extolling the virtues of perseverance, while also unflinchingly declaring that, “victory is mine, yeah, surprisingly.”
If you take Fried at face value — rail thin and mild-mannered — it seems like an off-beat choice, but in a lot of ways, it’s a perfect encapsulation of the pitcher who walked into New York and instantly made it his own.
It’s not always picture perfect — though his seven-inning performance in the Yankees' walk-off 4-3 win over the Padres Wednesday was certainly pretty good — but regardless, he’s worked his way into being everything the Yankees could have asked for and more.
And, as Fried's warm-up music suggests, he’s done it by essentially being a yeoman’s pitcher, especially in the context of staff ace. Though he can dial up his fastball to around 97, he mostly doesn’t throw incredibly hard — his average hovers just shy of 94-mph — and he doesn’t strike out an exorbitant number of batters. He cycles through seven pitches, and throws them all well, and his strength is in movement and deception. In short, Paul Skenes, he is not.
And victory has generally been his. Though maybe not too surprisingly.
Though Fried didn’t get the ‘W’ Wednesday, the Yankees have won every game that he’s started, and though he left with a one-run deficit, it was his steadying hand that helped prime the Yankees for their eventual victory. He allowed one run on five hits with no walks and eight strikeouts over seven innings in what Aaron Boone called “his best command game all year.”
He’s 6-0 and leads the American League in ERA (1.05) and innings pitched (55 1/3). Before Jackson Merrill’s solo homer in the fourth, Fried hadn’t allowed an earned run in four of his previous five starts.
He is the anchor, and he looks worth every penny of that $218 million contract — the largest ever extended to a left-handed pitcher.
He’s also a three-time Gold Glover — something he flashed Wednesday when he executed a glove flip to Paul Goldschmidt to get Luis Arraez out on a squibbler that died in the grass — and he has the best pickoff move in baseball, which has allowed the lefty to nab runners a major-league-leading four times this year. That’s no small feat in the age of pickoff-attempt limits, larger bases and pitch clocks.
Through it all, Fried has displayed the sort of grit that encapsulates what it means to thrive in this city. There’s no doubt that the Yankee pinstripes are heavy, but imagine how heavy they must be under the weight of that contract? When he signed here, it was also under the presumption that Cole would be slotted ahead of him in the rotation. Fried lost that soft(er) landing when the Yankees announced that the former Cy Young-award winner would undergo Tommy John surgery. No matter, though.
“It really doesn’t matter when you step out in the field and in between the lines,” Fried said after his victory over the Rays last week. “It’s about competing — doesn’t matter what city or anything at all. I enjoy the competition. I enjoy the mano-a-mano. To me, it’s just the same game, six feet, six inches, me versus you and I’ve got guys behind me defending me. The more simple I keep it and be aggressive and all the other cliches that I really do believe, it really does make it a lot easier for me.”
He likes cliches? How about this one: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
And please, don’t misconstrue this: Fried is very talented. But he certainly maximizes that talent by working very hard. Boone has talked about his intelligence before, but prior to the game Wednesday, he took a moment to acknowledge Fried’s savvy and adaptability.
“He’s got really good stuff and the movement quality of his pitches and the amount of them” make him difficult to hit, Boone said. It’s “the unpredictability. . . . Most other pitchers that typically have a three- or maybe four-pitch arsenal. There’s really no true straight fastball that he’s giving you — it’s sinker, his four-seamer with register sometimes but it’s always cutting and moving. The variance in the pitching speeds — it’s the really big slow curveball that’s an important pitch for him, the changeup and the sweeper. He’s got a range of probably 25 mph that he’ll change speeds on all of his pitches and they’re all moving in different directions. So he’s really tough to square up.”
Fried said he doesn’t feel materially different than he has in the past (though, granted, he’s always been a very good pitcher). And that makes sense. He’s steady. He’s dependable. He puts in the work.
“I feel like I’m throwing the ball well but as far as the results, the ERA, all that kind of stuff, I can’t really put a finger on it,” he said. “I’ve got great teammates…I’m just going out there and trying to compete and trying to win games.”
And though he departed after the seventh with his ERA ballooning to that unsightly 1.05, it remains clear that Fried is well on his way to crafting something special in the Bronx. Only three pitchers have recorded at least six wins with an ERA of 1.01 or lower in their first seven starts with a franchise since 1913, when the stat was first recorded.
To paraphrase Gang Starr, viciously, he makes history, instantly.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
