A Great Hitting Pitcher (For A Pitcher)

 A Great Hitting Pitcher (For A Pitcher)

I find Max Fried a very interesting player. For one, he is very talented and plays for the current best team in all of baseball. Aside from that and his .690 career winning percentage, I want to focus on his hitting. Not his career hitting, but one particular season. Max Fried won the Silver Slugger in 2021, and besides being awesome as a pitcher, he was also awesome as a hitter and fielder.

Alas, pitchers don’t hit anymore (unless you are Shohei Ohtani). That part of baseball has come to an end. You no longer get to witness pitchers trying to snap bats over their knees out of frustration anymore. But, in the last year pitchers hit, Max Fried hit higher than the league average.

He was no Shohei that year, but he had a very very good season, going 14-7 with a 3.04 ERA and 2 shutouts. But, while giving hitters a hard time, he also gave pitchers a hard time. Sort of. 

Fried had 55 ABs in 2021, and 15 hits. You may be thinking, ‘15 hits, that’s no big deal,’ but he did his job at the dish. If you get out your calculator, you will find that 15/55 is .272727272727. When translating that number to batting average, it comes out as .273. That’s pretty good, and really good if you are a pitcher. He hit better than his opponents, because that season through over 165 innings, opposing batters hit just .227 against Fried! He literally hit 46 points higher than his peers!

The batting average itself is good, but Fried also struck out just 26.9% of the time. That is only about 4% more than the league average! He also walked 10 times in 55 ABs, giving him an OBP of .322 that season! Not too shabby at all.

He was also a good fielder, winning the Gold Glove with a fielding percentage of .978, 20 points higher than the average for a pitcher, and a range factor of 2.44. That’s not as good as regular position players, but the average range factor for a pitcher that season was 1.49. He just missed beating that mark by a whole point.

So, Max Fried overall had an amazing 2021 season as a pitcher, hitter, and fielder. That’s why I find him such an interesting player. And he has just gotten better as a pitcher, going 14-7 again, but with a 2.48 ERA in 2022, and finishing 2nd in Cy Young voting only to Sandy Alcantara, who threw to a 2.28 ERA and 6 complete games.

In conclusion, Max Fried is a great pitcher who had an insane year hitting in 2021 as well as pitching and fielding. And he hit to a higher batting average than Ohtani that year.