Fried is certainly pace of play enthusiasts’ favorite Braves pitcher
As you may have heard, Max Fried was dominant last night, hurling the third Maddux of his career against the Marlins. But, did you know that the combination of Max Fried and the pitch clock resulted in the game taking less than two hours to complete?
Yesterday’s 5-0 win against the Marlins clocked in at just one hour and 54 minutes of runtime. While I don’t have an easy way to query game time, I know that the Braves had about one game running between 1:45 and 1:50 per season in the late 1990s, and given the increase in runtime up until the enactment of the pitch clock, I’m not sure if there were any outliers since.
But I do know that when we talk about fast games the Braves have played, there’s a good chance Fried was involved. Check out the table below, which has the fastest Braves games of each season, and a few other games thrown in for good measure.
Going back to 2017, which is when Fried got his first few major league starts, he’s figured into about half of the fastest-in-season games the Braves have had. Sure, some of them were rain-shortened or pandemic-rules-shortened (doubleheader games were seven innings in both 2020 and 2021), but some weren’t.
Particularly impressive from a runtime perspective was Fried’s 2022 game against the Pirates. Not only did that game feature seven total runs, but it also came in a Braves win on the road, meaning that it lasted a full nine innings while still ending up as the fastest Braves game of that season.
As far as I know, Max Fried doesn’t have any kids… that we know of. If you told me he was pitching so efficiently because he forgot he had to pick one up from day care, though… I might believe you.