TAMPA — The most devastating element of Max Fried’s seven-pitch arsenal is that hitters have no idea what his fastball will do. For a long time, the most annoying element of his arsenal was that Fried didn’t, either.
“Sometimes it would cut, sometimes it wouldn’t, and I didn’t really know why,” he says. “I was just throwing it and hoping that it was going to go over. Now I have a little bit more of an understanding of, like, O.K., when I throw [this], it’s going to cut, and when I throw [that], it’s going to stay a little straighter.”
