Who has a better chance of winning the 2024 Cy Young, Max Fried or Spencer Strider?

For Max Fried, it comes down to two things for his Cy Young case: luck and health. 

The lefty made only 14 starts in the regular season in 2023, owing to hamstring and forearm strains that sidelined him for most of the season. When he was on the mound, making 14 regular season starts, he was his usual dominant self: 8-1 record, 2.55 ERA, and 80 strikeouts to 18 walks. 

In both of Fried's Top 5 finish years, he didn't finish as the league leader in any of the attention-grabbing categories to voters - strikeouts, innings, or wins. Instead, Fried was just consistently around the top pitchers in baseball in most of those categories. 

One commonality for both of his finishes, and something that (anecdotally) seems to always work out in favor of the eventual winner, is an ERA number better than a FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) number. Fried outperformed his FIP in both years he made the final standings, and he'll need some luck and support from the Braves offense to lead the league in wins or innings. 

We specifically didn't mention Max Fried leading the league in strikeouts in 2024 because the odds-on favorite to do that is Spencer Strider. 

"Quadzilla" led baseball in both total strikeouts (281) and strikeouts rate (13.5 K/9) in 2023, setting an Atlanta Braves single-season record in the process by besting John Smoltz's 1996 season total of 276. 

And not only was Strider's mark the best in baseball, it wasn't particularly close. Amongst qualified pitchers (1.0 IP/team game), Strider was only two strikeouts per inning better than the next closest starter, San Diego's Blake Snell at 11.7 K/9. 

Strider needs to continue that strikeout dominance in 2024 if he wants to win the award, but he also needs some help in the ERA department. He actually led the National League in FIP, at 2.85, but his ERA was a full run higher at 3.86. This is because of Strider's bad luck with the longball - he served up 22 homers in 2023, a rate of 1.1 HR/9. The three players above him in the voting all gave up the same or less homers, but in significantly more innings and so had a much better homer rate. 

For now, I'm going to say Max Fried. That isn't to take anything away from Spencer Strider - far from it - but Max Fried when healthy has shown the ability to force his way into that conversation multiple times in his career. 

For Fried, it's all going to come down to some luck: Can he pitch enough innings and get enough run support to top the leaderboard in either wins or innings pitched? Can he suppress hard contract enough to take the ERA crown?

I feel better about his chances to do that than Spencer Strider's chances of going deep enough into games and suppressing enough home runs to get higher on the leaderboards in the rest of the conventional statistics. 

Plus, the dynamic of Max Fried entering his free agency "platform year" can't be ignored. The looming contract that's out there after the season has a way of making players reach a different level of dominance, and Max Fried's a competitor that might see what reigning Cy Young winner Blake Snell gets in free agency this offseason and decides to beat that on the market next season.