Max Fried Loses Arbitration Hearing Against Atlanta

Atlanta’s Max Fried misplaced his arbitration listening to in opposition to the group, in accordance with Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The CAA Sports activities consumer will likely be paid $13.5MM for the upcoming season, moderately than the $15MM he’d filed for.

Fried’s been a high quality starter for quite a few years now, however put collectively his greatest season but in 2022, tossing 185 1/3 innings of two.48 ball. The left-handed Fried walked batters simply 4.4% of the time – about half that of the league-average, whereas hanging out batters at a 23.2% clip. That output was price 5 fWAR, an All Star look and a runner-up end in NL Cy Younger voting. Fried additionally took dwelling a Gold Glove for his protection.

The 29-year-old has been one of many sport’s greatest starters over the previous few seasons. Since 2020, Fried owns a 2.68 ERA over 407 innings (69 begins). Nevertheless, his good season in 2022 evidently wasn’t sufficient to sway the case in his favor, and he’ll take dwelling $1.5MM lower than he’d argued for in his third season of arbitration eligibility (Fried is a Tremendous Two participant). It’s the second straight season Fried and Atlanta have gone to a listening to to find out his wage. Final season he took dwelling a $6.85MM wage after profitable his case in opposition to Atlanta, who had argued for a wage of $6.6MM – a $250K distinction.

At occasions, the distinction in wage can appear moderately trivial given the wage being earned, and notably on this case given Fried’s standing as top-of-the-line pitchers within the sport. So it’s price having a look at this text from MLBTR from 2015 for a deeper look contained in the arbitration course of, and why groups haggle over what can generally appear to be moderately insignificant sums of cash.

That is Fried’s penultimate 12 months of membership management, and barring a long-term extension he’ll undergo arbitration as soon as extra subsequent winter earlier than hitting free company after the 2024 season. After all, given Atlanta’s latest behavior of tying up their stars to long-term contracts it actually wouldn’t shock to see them make a play at conserving Fried long run, though his output so far and dwindling years of membership management would recommend it’d take a big sum to get a deal achieved.