HOUSTON -- The planning began early last week.
Nearly a decade has passed since Jack Flaherty, Max Fried and Lucas Giolito teamed up at Harvard-Westlake, an uber-exclusive, highly regarded private school within Los Angeles. But they have grown closer ever since, bonding over the rigors of pitching at their sport's highest level. Now, at the onset of this World Series, a special opportunity awaited.
Fried was scheduled to start Game 2, an early indication that his next outing -- almost certainly Game 6 of this series -- might coincide with the chance to clinch a championship. When the Atlanta Braves dropped Game 5 at home to the Houston Astros on Sunday, sending them back to Houston with a three-games-to-two lead, the wheels were quickly set in motion. Before the night was over, Flaherty, Giolito and Matt LaCour, the coach of that celebrated Harvard-Westlake team from 2012, all had flights to Texas.
They'll all sit together at Minute Maid Park on Tuesday, when Fried takes the mound with the hopes of delivering the Braves their first title in more than a quarter century.
"I'm definitely a little jealous," Giolito, now a central member of the Chicago White Sox's starting rotation, told ESPN on Monday. "But at the same time, I'm super pumped."
Giolito and Fried became teammates in the fall of 2011, when Giolito helped persuade Fried to transfer to Harvard-Westlake for his senior season after the athletic program shuttered at his previous school. It set the stage for a remarkable tandem. Giolito had emerged as one of the best pitching prospects in the country. Fried, now 27, was one of few equals. Flaherty, then a sophomore, had a chance to be even better. The promise of their lone season together unraveled early, when Giolito tore his ulnar collateral ligament in his second start, but the relationships remained firm thereafter.
They supported each other through Giolito's lengthy rehab in 2012, Fried's Tommy John surgery in 2014 and Flaherty's shoulder injury in 2021. They celebrated one another when Flaherty emerged in 2018, when Giolito bounced back from a third-year slump in 2019 and when Fried nearly won the Cy Young Award in 2020.
Flaherty and Giolito were eliminated within 10 days of each other in early October -- Flaherty's St. Louis Cardinals in a walk-off loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Wild Card Game, and Giolito's White Sox in four American League Division Series games by these same Astros.
Since then, they have lived vicariously through Fried.
Flaherty, who still spends his offseasons in L.A., was at Dodger Stadium to watch him pitch in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. Giolito, who has since moved to northern California, would've flown to Houston for Game 2 of the World Series had he not still been quarantined after contracting COVID-19 near the end of his season.
They watched Fried's postseason go from two stirring performances to two sluggish ones. And since then, they have taken opposite approaches in their support. Giolito has offered encouragement and positivity where he can; Flaherty has avoided the topic of baseball altogether.
"I have not talked to him, and I probably will not talk to him, before tomorrow," Flaherty said Monday night. "I'm just letting him be him."
Flaherty, conscious of how overwhelming baseball can feel at this stage, has mostly engaged in side conversations that have nothing to do with their profession. The last time baseball was even mentioned was more than three weeks ago, when Fried twirled six scoreless innings against the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 2 of the NL Division Series. You're nasty, Flaherty wrote in a text. And that was it.
Six innings of two-run ball against the Dodgers in the opening game of the NLCS followed, but then Fried was charged with 11 runs in 9⅔ innings over his next two starts, in Game 5 against the Dodgers and in Game 2 against the Astros. The latter start saw Fried give up four second-inning runs on a barrage of singles, many of which were not hit particularly hard, then recover well enough to pitch into the sixth inning.
Fried's resiliency, a trait Flaherty identifies as a separator, was evident that night. LaCour first noticed it nine years ago, in the spring of 2012, weeks before that year's draft. Practically every scouting director and crosschecker in the country had flocked to North Carolina for a nationally prominent showcase. And Matt Olson, now an All-Star first baseman with the Oakland Athletics, hit a ball so far off Fried that LaCour wonders if it has since made landfall.
"Max could've crumbled that day," said LaCour, who transitioned to Harvard-Westlake's athletic director beginning in 2016. "He could've fallen down and just said, 'Hey, I just don't have my good stuff.' They didn't score the rest of the day. That was in the first inning, and they didn't get another one. He's got resiliency. I think that we saw that back in the day, and I think the Braves have seen that throughout the second half and previously -- that this kid can bounce back."
Less than 24 hours after his Game 2 loss, Fried played a light game of catch from Truist Park in Atlanta and reported feeling better than he had in a while. After the Braves lost Charlie Morton to a fractured fibula early in Game 1, their rotation had been whittled to Fried, Ian Anderson and nobody else. A bullpen day had already been scheduled for Game 4 and could follow in Game 5, so Fried told his pitching coach, Rick Kranitz, that he would be ready to take the ball on short rest if needed. ("He's been champing at the bit to get back," Kranitz said.) The Braves' victories in Games 3 and 4 eliminated the necessity, and now they've allowed Fried to be extra rested heading into Game 6.
It's an opportunity Braves manager Brian Snitker believes Fried is "relishing."
"I can just tell during the games, talking to him the last couple nights on the bench -- I think he's really looking forward to this opportunity," Snitker said. "He's right where he needs to be."
Fried, the seventh overall pick by the San Diego Padres in 2012, joined the Braves as the prized prospect in the December 2014 trade of Justin Upton and established himself as a full-time member of the Braves' rotation during his age-25 season in 2019, when his slider developed into an effective third pitch to complement a nasty four-seam fastball and curve.
"He's got some of the best stuff in the game," Flaherty said, "but he gets overlooked a lot."
Fried excelled during the COVID-19-shortened regular season in 2020, going 7-0 with a 2.25 ERA, but four others finished ahead of him in NL Cy Young Award voting. He put himself on the map with a brilliant performance in the 2020 NL Wild-Card Game, then helped push his team into the playoffs during the stretch run of the 2021 season. In this year's second half, as the Braves ascended toward a division title that once seemed unreachable, Fried posted a major-league-best 1.74 ERA in 14 starts. Opponents slugged only .290 against him, 137 points lower than they did before the All-Star break. The turnaround, Giolito believes, was rooted in traits he has long admired in Fried -- firm self-analysis and a devotion to detailed preparation.
"Yes, he has extremely nasty stuff -- we all know that," Giolito said. "But his level of preparedness when it comes to going over scouting reports, knowing what he needs to do for every single guy he's facing, one through nine, whether that be sequencing, location, what these guys like to do with runners in scoring position versus when there's nobody on base -- he knows all that information going into every single start."
Giolito's last start took place at the same place he visits Tuesday night, during Game 2 of the ALDS on Oct. 8. He struggled then, walking five batters and exiting before the end of the fifth inning, and later told Fried that he found himself intermittently losing focus. "You're gonna learn from this," Fried told him. Fried stressed the importance of treating every postseason start as if it's the last of the season, no matter the round, and said that the preparation and focus must be reflective of it. The tank, essentially, must be emptied.
Fried vows to take his own advice Tuesday night.
"I'm ready to go out there and leave it all on the field," he said. "It's probably going to be my last outing of the year, so there's nothing to hold back."