As Aaron Boone logged onto a Zoom call between the Yankees and Max Fried this past December, he wondered whether the pitcher made sense for the Bronx’s bright lights.
“For whatever reason, I went in thinking, ‘Oh, he’s maybe going to be more reserved. I don’t know that he wants to come play in New York,’ those kinds of things,” Boone recalled early this spring. “And when we got off that call, I went, ‘Wow, that was great.’
“It was easy conversation. I feel like he connected with however many of us were on that call.”
Brian Cashman agreed, telling the Daily News it was “as if we knew each other.”
It helped that Fried actually had a preexisting relationship with one member of the Bombers’ brass: special advisor Omar Minaya.
“I think Cash leaned on the fact that I had some history,” Minaya told The News, though he didn’t want to act like he was solely responsible for the Yankees signing Fried to an eight-year, $218 million deal.
Minaya served as the Padres’ senior vice president of baseball operations when they used the seventh overall pick in the 2012 draft on Fried. Minaya personally scouted an 18-year-old Fried at Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake School, and he got to know the pitcher throughout the pre-draft process.
While San Diego traded Fried to Atlanta two years later and Minaya eventually returned to the Mets, the two stayed in touch. Now Fried is set to make his pinstriped debut against the Brewers on Saturday.
“He’s always been very supportive,” Fried told The News, though he did not know that Minaya had joined the Yankees until he appeared on Zoom.
The familiar face made it easier for Fried to open up on a 90-minute call.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” said Fried, who also received lucrative offers from the Red Sox and Rangers. “It’s pretty cool to have someone that knew me from the beginning.
“It allowed me to be a little bit more comfortable on the call.”
According to Cashman, Minaya knew Fried and his family “intimately.” Minaya specified that he’s particularly close with a few New York-based members of Fried’s fam from his mother’s side.
Cashman added that Minaya mentioned the overlap in San Diego during the video conference. Minaya, a former general manager, also told Fried how pleased he was with the pitcher’s growth and success.
“Knowing him as a kid and what he was and how he developed and how he communicated when we had that call, he just communicated so intelligently,” Minaya said. “He’s so intelligent about pitching and passionate and understanding. So I was just very proud of him.”
Minaya remembered the first time he saw Fried in-person at Harvard-Westlake. The southpaw struggled that day, but Minaya left the game impressed with the way Fried competed through adversity.
Minaya walked away convinced that the Padres should take Fried if he fell to them. Those feelings only intensified as Minaya became better acquainted with the “classic left-hander.”
“As an evaluator, he was easy to like,” Minaya said. “He was a profile of what you look for in a young high school pitcher. The delivery was clean. Arm action was good. Good athlete, competitor. His velocity was average, but the secondary pitches [stood out]. He had what we call a traditional, old-school curveball. He threw it, and you could see that he was going to have that pitch for the rest of his life because it was natural to him.”
With those feelings lingering all these years later, Minaya was glad to see Fried “high on the list of Plan B” options in the event the Yankees lost Juan Soto’s free agent sweepstakes.
That’s exactly what happened, as the Yanks and Fried agreed to the largest guarantee ever for a left-hander two days after Soto and the Mets came to terms on a record-setting 15-year, $765 million deal. Coincidentally, Minaya played a large part in the Yankees’ acquisition of Soto two winters ago, as his friendship with Padres general manager A.J. Preller helped facilitate that blockbuster.
Fried’s contract made him the face of a post-Soto pivot that also saw the Yankees acquire Devin Williams, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt. Now Fried is the Yankees’ de facto ace with Gerrit Cole sidelined by Tommy John surgery.
Cole’s season-ending injury bummed Minaya, as he assumed the Cy Young winner and Fried would “fit like a glove” due to their savant-like minds for pitching.
That prediction appeared spot-on in the early days of camp, as Cole said he and Fried “speak the same language.”
While Carlos Rodón took Cole’s Opening Day start to keep others’ schedules intact, there’s no arguing that Fried is the new No. 1 of this injury-ravaged staff as the Yankees try for a return to the World Series and their first championship since 2009.
It’s a somewhat unfamiliar position for Fried. As talented as he is — no pitcher with at least 500 innings has a better ERA since 2020 — he rarely had to be the undisputed leader of Braves rotations that included Chris Sale, Spencer Strider and Charlie Morton.
Fried is also admittedly shy and on the “reserved side,” just as Boone suspected. But he also considers himself curious and inquisitive.
Minaya saw those tendencies in a teenage Fried years ago, and the Yankees noticed them right away on that fateful Zoom call. They remained visible as Fried navigated his first spring training with his new team, as he picked the brains of Cole, Matt Blake and guest instructors such as Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, Ron Guidry and CC Sabathia.
“He’s been a sponge,” Boone said.
Expect that to continue with the Yankees now more dependent on Fried than when they signed him.
“He’s reserved, but an observant reserved,” Minaya said. “He’s one of those guys that’s always learning.”