Prospects On The Move: Max Fried

After covering new Nationals top prospect Joe Ross in our last installment, I didn’t anticipate having to write about another former Padres farmhand, but it appears most GM’s are sleeping on the job while A.J. Preller continues to work the phones to rebuild his team.

Max Fried

Team: Atlanta Braves

Acquired: From Padres in trade that sent Justin Upton to San Diego.

Position: LHP

D.O.B: 1/18/94 (20)

Height: 6’4″

Weight: 185

While Fried is certainly the centerpiece of the deal that sent Justin Upton to the Padres, further confirming the rebuild in Atlanta, the young southpaw isn’t without large concerns about his future.

The former first-rounder (7th overall) out of Harvard-Westlake H.S in Los Angeles, CA had a rocky 2014 after a promising 2013 campaign. Fried would miss most of the season with forearm soreness and wouldn’t see the mound again until July. He would make just a handful of appearances, tallying just 10.2 innings and he never seemed right. The Padres medical staff would eventually determine that Tommy John surgery would be the best course of action for Fried, and he would undergo the procedure in August. He will likely miss all of 2015, meaning he’s essentially lost two years of development time.

When healthy, Fried was a top prospect with a tall, lean frame and a delivery that most scouts thought was clean and easy. His fastball sat in the low 90’s with good arm-side movement. His best pitch, the curveball, showed tight spin and a nasty break– a swing-and-miss type offering. Max’s changeup was also a potential plus pitch with good deception that played well off of his fastball.

Outlook: Hopefully Fried can come back and be the prospect most evaluators thought he would be. If he reaches his projections, he could be a number two type starter with three above-average to plus pitches at his disposal. The fortunate thing is that at just 20-years of age he has time on his side.