I feel like we’ve been waiting a long time to see the unleashed Max Fried. He’s a first round pick in 2012, we picked him up in the beginning of The Great Rebuild in the Justin Upton trade, and we sit here in 2019 waiting for him to have the training wheels taken off at the big league level. No one’s babying him, though, as there has been good reason to protect him.
After picking him up, he missed the 2015 season recovering from Tommy John. But throughout parts of his 2016 through 2018 campaigns, he was either being eased back after Tommy John or dealing with nagging blisters.