Max Fried Makes Doubles Disappear

By the peripheral metrics, Max Fried is nothing particular. Over the course of his profession, his strikeout and stroll charges sit someplace across the league common. By outcomes, nonetheless, he appears like a Corridor of Famer; his 2.81 ERA because the begin of 2020 ranks third amongst all starters. When groups ponder whether or not to supply the left-hander a five- or six-year deal this winter, one query shall be high of thoughts: Who’s the actual Max Fried?

Final week, Thomas Harrigan at MLB.com argued that Fried’s contact prevention resume may be the strongest of any modern pitcher. Harrigan famous that, after setting a cutoff, no one has allowed a decrease barrel fee this decade. That’s mirrored in Fried’s house run fee and due to this fact his FIP — aside from Logan Webb, no starter allowed fewer house runs on a fee foundation. Because of that tremendous low house run fee, Fried posted a 3.11 FIP and 15.4 WAR over the last decade — robust numbers, however reflective of an excellent pitcher slightly than one of many sport’s elite.

One factor FIP ignores is the variety of doubles a pitcher permits. Fried allowed simply 16 doubles in 2024, tied for the bottom mark amongst all certified pitchers. That low doubles fee is constant along with his efficiency through the years — in the course of the 2020s, solely 3.5% of the hitters Fried confronted reached on doubles, rating sixth-lowest amongst 173 pitchers within the pattern:

Can Fried declare credit score for this ability? For FanGraphs readers and writers, the query is basically tutorial. For groups, nonetheless, the reply carries multi-million greenback implications. How a lot of that doubles suppression is Fried, and the way a lot of it’s the Braves’ protection and ballpark, the hitter he’s dealing with, the climate on any given day, or some other variety of exterior variables?

These questions are significantly related for Fried, who ranks as merely first rate by the 2 elements of pitching most ostensibly underneath his management. If a staff gives him a hefty deal, they’re betting that his skill to stop additional base hits on balls in play is a predictable ability. I imagine that guess can be one.

Final week, I wrote about Nick Martinez, who leverages his six-pitch arsenal to induce weak contact to each lefties and righties. In that piece, I outlined the pitch-by-pitch concept of the case — sinkers into righties, cutters into lefties — in addition to the multiplicative impact of his pitches in live performance. (Marek Ramilo of Driveline makes use of the instance of bishops in chess: A bishop alone on the board is value roughly three pawns, however two energetic bishops are value extra like 9 pawns, or 4.5 pawns every.) However the place Martinez sows confusion by producing pitches that look the identical out of hand, Fried takes the alternative method.

The “similarity of pitches out of the hand” impact, measured by the Driveline mannequin Match+, grades Fried as roughly league common. (I wrote about Match+ within the context of each Martinez and Tarik Skubal final month, who each excel by this measure.) However there may be one other mannequin referred to as Combine+ that Driveline makes use of to quantify the breadth of an arsenal. Combine+ calculates the pairwise distance between a pitcher’s choices in three-dimensional house when the quicker pitch reaches the plate after which adjusts for the frequency of every pitch:

The speculation behind Combine+ is two-fold. First, pitchers who rank greater in Combine+ ought to obtain extra takes owing to the unfold of potential pitch motion patterns. However the constructive results of a large arsenal additionally lengthen to the standard of contact {that a} pitcher permits, in line with the findings of Marek and Jack Lambert. As a result of hitters should account for a wide range of potential shapes at various speeds, they’re much less prone to unleash an “A” swing:

As you may see, solely Chris Sale ranked greater in Combine+ than Fried in 2024. He will get there largely due to the form of his curveball and the way ceaselessly he makes use of it. He throws his curveball roughly 20% of the time, with a slight uptick in frequency to right-handed hitters. At -17 inches of induced vertical break, it will get extra “drop” than all however 5 different pitches in all of baseball:

It’s a real two-plane arcing magnificence, and Fried makes use of it to drop in referred to as strikes and get whiffs from unsuspecting hitters. Its 38.1% called-strike-and-whiff share in 2024 ranked among the many greatest for any pitch thrown as ceaselessly as Fried threw his curveball:

Nevertheless it isn’t simply the efficiency of the curveball in a vacuum. The potential for the curveball in batters’ minds impacts the remainder of Fried’s pitches, most notably his four-seam fastball, which bores in on right-handed hitters like a lefty model of Corbin Burnes’ cutter. Fried’s fastball and sinker each common 94 mph; his curveball averages 75 mph. The excessive chance of seeing both a tough fastball working in on the arms or a curveball with vital loop shifting practically 20 mph slower results in uncomfortable at-bats, unsure swings, and ugly batted ball high quality.

That is evident within the habits of batters. It’s a reasonably tight distribution — the chief and the laggard are separated by simply three ticks — however amongst all pitchers who confronted no less than 400 hitters in 2024, solely Fried’s Combine+ peer Sale induced slower swings. And naturally, when a batter swings slower, their contact high quality suffers. (These bat velocity stats are courtesy of Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard, which simply launched some candy updates.)

Observing exit velocities and launch angles, measuring bat velocity, analyzing three-dimensional pitch trajectories — these instruments weren’t out there to Voros McCracken when he revealed his seminal work on Protection Impartial Pitching Statistics concept, or DIPS concept for brief, within the early 2000s.

Many (together with me, on this web site, final week) misrepresent the basic rules of DIPS concept. DIPS doesn’t say that pitchers lack management over batted ball outcomes, as Mike Quick identified on Bluesky final week. What DIPS posited was {that a} pitcher’s ERA depends upon a number of issues outdoors their management, and so the baseball statistics neighborhood should undertake an effort to measure what a pitcher is answerable for.

Fielding Impartial Pitching, or FIP, was the primary of those efforts, a creation of the sabermetric big Tom Tango. It stays influential to this present day, and actually continues to carry out nicely at predicting a pitcher’s subsequent season ERA even if it was not designed to be predictive. It appears solely at house runs, strikeouts, and walks, the occasions Tango deemed probably the most in a pitcher’s management.

As novel types of knowledge got here on-line, from PITCHf/x in 2007 to the debut of Statcast in 2015, new approaches had been developed to refine the best that DIPS outlined and that FIP put into apply. xERA replaces house run fee with anticipated injury from exit velocities and launch angles; over at Baseball Prospectus, DRA incorporates a mixed-models method to account for these exterior variables like batter high quality and ballpark, assigning credit score and blame for each given plate look.

DIPS concept won’t ever die, as a result of the important perception will at all times stay true — the first-generation pitching statistics relied too closely on the park and the protection behind the pitcher, and there should have been a correction to account for this reality. However as Quick wrote, all DIPS claims is that batted ball outcomes are correlated with the DIPS stats like FIP. As we sit right here within the waning days of 2024, we will say for positive that there are statistics which can be much more strongly correlated with batted ball outcomes. There exists a possibility to higher perceive the connection of the pitcher to batted ball outcomes than ever earlier than, thanks to those new-generation modeling strategies in addition to ever-new sources of knowledge — bat velocity, arm angle, future biomechanical outputs.

All of those new fashions and inputs improve our understanding of what a pitcher can management, however the downside is way from solved. It’s an especially tough downside, in any case. However there may be cause to imagine a pitcher like Max Fried can comprise doubles at a fee that FIP declines to provide him credit score for; DRA won’t even absolutely credit score Fried for his contributions. These metrics are designed to use to all pitchers, however Fried is a real outlier. Combine+ supplies a compelling concept for why that may be the case.