Max Fried has made 40 starts for the Yankees since they signed him as a free agent. His 41st start is scheduled for Friday night in Milwaukee. Last season he was 19-5, pitching as an absolute ace in the absence of Gerrit Cole, with an ERA of 2.86, 189 strikeouts in 195 1/3 innings. Fried started 32 games. This season he is 4-1 through his first eight starts, with a 2.39 ERA. Real bottom line here? It hasn’t taken long for him to go in with the best free-agent pitching signings the Yankees have ever had.
Not only has he been everything the Yankees could have hoped they were getting. He has been more. The most games he ever started in Atlanta was 30, the most wins he had there was 17, the most batters he ever struck out in a season was 173. He had lower earned run averages there than he’s had in New York a few times. But not lower by a lot. Two other star lefty starters -- Tarik Skubal and Garrett Crochet -- are hurt. Fried just keeps going.
After just these 40 starts, he has already joined the list of other big-ticket star pitching signings like this. He goes in the line with Cole, who won a Cy Young Award after getting to New York, and CC Sabathia, the ace who pitched the Yankees to the last World Series they won, back in 2009. Before them was Mike Mussina, who originally signed a six-year contract before the 2001 season and was still good enough at the end of it that the Yankees signed him for two more seasons, and he won 20 games in 2008 before retiring.
Now there is Fried, waiting for Cole to rejoin the team, up there at the top of that rotation with the kid, Cam Schlittler. So often with free agents, they’ve already had their best seasons. Not Fried. Even as a Yankee now, it’s frankly easy to lose sight sometimes of just how good he’s been.
David Cone of the YES Network, as good a baseball analyst on television now as he was as a pitcher once for both New York teams, is always someone with whom to talk about pitching in general and pitching in New York in particular. So I asked David about Fried, starting with why his stuff is as good as it is, and he was more than happy to oblige.
“He is a movement specialist,” Cone said. “Like a video game. Subtle variations of cutters and sinkers working off each other. With a Koufax curve in his back pocket.”
Cone, a right-hander who once pitched a perfect game at Yankee Stadium -- on Yogi Berra Day, with Don Larsen in attendance, you can’t do much more of a Yankee thing than that -- could have been describing the creative way that he once attacked hitters himself. Perhaps that is why he added this, admiringly, about Fried, and again could have been talking about the way he approached the art and craft of pitching once:
“Max is smart and curious. And never satisfied.”
The Yankees signed Fried before last season to an eight-year contract worth $218 million, using some of the money on him they didn’t get to spend on Juan Soto. But this was New York, and the kind of stage that the city provides, and not just in baseball. So with the money comes pressure and expectations to deliver. Reggie Jackson did it a long time ago. Aaron Judge has done it in lights, even though he had already become a great Yankee before signing his own $360 million contract. CC won that World Series, Mussina nearly did, Cole may yet when he is back at the top of the rotation with Fried and Schlittler and Carlos Rodon, too.
Still, Fried has not just met whatever expectations the Yankees and their fans had for him, he has exceeded them so far. I asked Cone, who had already pitched for the Blue Jays in the 1992 World Series before being a part of four World Series winners with the Yankees, about delivering the way he did once knowing the responsibilities that came with the stage, and the pressures.
“With me,” he said, “the motivation was fear of failure.”
The Yankees and their fans have seen nothing like that with Fried. It is an established baseball fact that not everybody is made for New York. Soto was, clearly. He came to the Yankees in a trade and had the best season of his career, and then went from the Bronx to Queens and was just as productive for the Mets as he had been in the same batting order with Judge.
Fried came to New York and to the Yankees with the expectation that he would be the No. 2 starter to Cole, who’d won his Cy Young Award in 2023. But Cole underwent Tommy John surgery in the spring of 2025. Now Fried was the ace, and he proceeded to pitch like one, ending up with more wins last season than Cole did when he won his Cy Young Award, and Fried had nearly as low an ERA.
Somehow, Fried has kept a low profile, while maintaining his own high standards. Not just better than he ever was. Right now, today, he’s the best left-handed starter in the game. Not Mad Max. Just mad good.