The New York Mets suffered another tough loss last night, but Nolan McLain continues to turn in great starts.
Watching a start by Nolan McLean is different. The New York Mets pitcher showed that last night, as hitters like Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman bent backwards as if they were being brushed back, only to see McLean’s offering clip the strike zone.
It’s a remarkable thing to watch, and Mets manager Carlos Mendoza was among those who noticed.
"He pretty much dominated one of the best lineups in the league,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said.
The Mets gave McLean no support during the Mets’ 2-1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and he left the game after seven innings with the score tied at 1-1.
“He gave us the momentum,” shortstop Francisco Lindor said of McLean in an article written by Anthony DiComo of MLB.com, “and we didn’t capitalize on it.”
But McLean is capitalizing on his ongoing opportunities to add his name to the Mets record books, which is something that started during his late-season cameo last year.
By allowing just two hits and two walks with eight strikeouts, McLean lowered his career ERA to 2.13, which is second in Mets history by a pitcher through 12 career starts. That puts him ahead of names like Seaver, Koosman, Gooden and deGrom, and it’s also putting Mendoza in some interesting spots now that McLean is built up enough to go deeper into games.
The plan was to cap McLean’s evening at 100 pitches, and he finished the seventh inning with 95. Mendoza chose to remove him and stick to the plan, but that plan backfired last night.
"He did his job there,” Mendoza said of his decision to insert receiver Brooks Raley. “At that point, I just decided to go with a clean inning [for Raley].”
The loss was disappointing, but the Mets have to be ecstatic about what McLean is doing. It’s easy enough to slot a promising young pitcher into a prominent rotation slot in the offseason, but more often than not these kinds of plans go sideways.
Instead, McLean kept the Mets in the game by matching opposing starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto as the pair kept putting up zeroes, and McLean caught the eye of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.
“Man, it was [an] old school pitchers duel,” Roberts said.
“They were both awesome,” Mendoza added. “Yamamoto was pretty nasty, but Nolan was pretty nasty, too. They went head-to-head. It was inning after inning, batter after batter, pitch after pitch. They made it tough on hitters.”
Sooner or later McLean will get some run support, and when that happens, his outings will become even more fun to watch. He’s turning potential into performance, and McLean is rapidly rising to become one of the better pitchers in the game right now.