The Atlanta Braves managed to avoid having one of the league's biggest arbitration classes earlier this offseason thanks to a series of trades and non-tenders that trimmed down their 40 man roster significantly of arb-eligible guys. However, the Braves still have a couple very key players including Max Fried who are arbitration-eligible that need to be addressed by this afternoon. Complicating matters, the deadline for exchanging arbitration figures having been moved to today suddenly puts Fried's arbitration case front and center a touch sooner than everyone thought.
Fan have been clamoring for answers for a while now when it comes to Max Fried's future with the Braves. Fried has been one of the better pitchers in baseball over the last several years and as he enters his final year of team control in 2024, the hope is that the Braves can find a way to keep him around for the long haul. So far, there has been little in the way of news or progress seen towards making that happen.
Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how it goes), today's arbitration deadline should give us a sense of how the two sides currently value Fried. While today won't firmly decide his long-term future, it will at least tell us how far apart the Braves and Fried are and if said gap is too large to realistically overcome in negotiations.
Max Fried's arbitration case will set the tone for his impending free agency
Max Fried's arbitration case is a fascinating one. On the one hand, Fried has been among the best pitchers in the game over the last four seasons with a combined 2.66 ERA in 83 starts and 484.2 innings pitched while placing in the top 5 of NL Cy Young voting twice along the way. Based solely on those numbers, Fried should get a sizable pay bump in his final year of arbitration from the $13.5 million he got in his second year of arbitration eligibility in 2023.
However, Fried's case gets a lot murkier once injury history starts getting factored in. Fried has always been a guy that gets dinged up. He has dealt with blister issues his entire career including in the minor leagues and minor injuries have consistently cost him time here and there since he got to the big leagues. The big one, though, is the elbow injury that cost Fried a huge chunk of the 2023 season. Fried pitched very well upon returning from the IL, but a recent significant arm injury for a guy that already has a Tommy John surgery on his ledger should give anyone pause when it comes to handing out big money including in arbitration.
The end result is a wide variance of potential outcomes when it comes to Fried's final arbitration year. Even the experts haven't been able to settle on what Fried's 2024 arb number should be as MLB Trade Rumors, who usually get pretty close, predicts Fried to get $14.4 million in arbitration this year while Spotrac is much more bullish in projecting a whopping $21.6 million for him.
Aside from the 2024 payroll implications which are significant, what happens today should tell us a lot about any potential gap between the Braves and Fried. No one should be surprised if Fried and the Braves have to go to an arbitration hearing. They have done so twice before with each side winning once and there were no hard feelings from either hearing previously. In Fried's case, going to a hearing isn't the end of of the world and is par for the course.
This year does have some added weight, though. Even just going from the above projections as examples, if the Braves file at MLBTR's $14.4 million figure and Fried's camp files at Spotrac's $21.4, that would represent a $7 million gap for 2024 which would represent a huge gap. Once you factor in potential differences in how to account for Fried's injuries and the inflation of starting pitching contracts in recent years, it isn't hard to foresee a big difference of opinions on the horizon.
If the Braves and Fried fail to settle before the 1 PM deadline today which is extremely likely, the focus turns to the sides filing figures which WILL matter quite a bit. If the two sides are relatively close (within a few million), that could be a nice starting point for negotiations and re-signing Fried after the season becomes a lot more plausible. However, if there is a big gap between the Braves' and Fried's filing figures today, that gap isn't likely to get any smaller when he hits free agency after the season as one of the best pitchers on the market.
In short, today's arbitration deadline won't seal Fried's long-term future with the Braves or lack thereof. However, it should give us a strong sense of where the two sides stand going in and how likely it truly is that Atlanta will be able to keep Fried around after the season.