When the Yankees lost out on Juan Soto last winter, they pivoted to bringing in a couple players to try and strengthen the roster. The headliner of those acquisitions was starting pitcher Max Fried, who was hitting the market after a good career with the Atlanta Braves.
At the time of the signing, Fried was seen as an excellent No. 2 — or even a No. 1-A — starter behind Yankees ace and 2023 AL Cy Young Gerrit Cole. However then spring training happened, and Gerrit Cole ended up getting injured, leaving
Fried as the de facto ace. While he went threw a blip in the middle of the season, he mostly lived up to that billing and will likely get Cy Young votes when those ballots are released after the season.
While he didn’t end up factoring into the decision — for absolutely no fault of his own — Fried absolutely showed off that ace status in Game 1 of the Yankees AL Wild Card Series against the Red Sox, even if it ended in a 3-1 Yankees’ loss. Fried went 6.1 innings on Tuesday night, allowing zero runs on four hits and three walks, striking out six. He also spent the entire game having to pitch with no or just one run of wiggle room, thanks to the Yankees’ offense not getting him much support.
Boston’s only real chances against Fried came in the final couple innings. In the fourth, he issued a two-out walk to Carlos Narváez, and then a double to Nate Eaton. Fried responded by bouncing back with a strikeout to get out of the inning. In the fifth, another two-out walk and hit left him in some trouble, but he induced an inning-ending grounder after that. Finally in the sixth, he got another ground ball to start an inning-ending double play after he had walked Narváez again.
Aaron Boone removing Fried when he did will probably go down as controversial considering what happened after, but it felt understandable at the time. Fried had thrown a lot of high leverage pitches to escape those aforementioned innings, and he was up over 100 on his pitch count. With the lineup about to rollover back to the top, he wasn’t going to be long for the game anyway. Perhaps Boone could’ve tried to squeeze two more outs from him to get through the seventh, but it didn’t feel like an especially quick hook in the moment. Maybe the shakiness of the bullpen should’ve played a bigger role in Boone’s decision, but Fried’s previous time through the order was far from clean.
No matter what happened after he left the game, Fried gets absolutely zero blame. He left with the bases empty having not allowed a run, and he wasn’t in the lineup that failed to score more than one run.
The only other real contender for a Game 1 Player of the Game is Anthony Volpe. His home run in the second inning ended up being the Yankees’ only run of the day, and he also singled in the eighth inning and caused some havoc on the basepaths before he was stranded in scoring position.
There’s a lot of bad things to say about the Yankees’ performance in Game 1, but Max Fried is absolutely no part of that. He did just about everything you could have asked of him.
