Seven of the first eight pitches from Mets right-hander Nolan McLean were outside the zone to start Sunday’s series finale against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Citi Field.
McLean, who would walk the first two he faced, managed to overcome the lack of command without walking another man as he pitched 5.0 innings of two-run ball on four hits and a hit batter with eight strikeouts in cool and at times blustery conditions.
“We could see it the first couple of batters he was missing arm side, he didn’t have a good feel for his pitches pretty much ’til the fourth inning,” manager Carlos Mendoza said after the Mets fell 4-3 in 10 innings.
The right-hander said that the conditions made it so that he felt like his pitches were “moving a little bit more than they normally do,” and he just had to “pick out the right sight line.”
“At the beginning, the first three innings, especially the secondaries, the spin — the sweeper, the curveball — it was just a ball out of the hand,” Mendoza said.
McLean indicated that the bigger challenge than getting the right feel came from throwing into a headwind.
“Throwing into the headwind is sometimes a little tricky, especially when my stuff’s moving a little more dramatically than it normally does,” he said. “I was just trying to find where I needed to start my pitches, and it was a little bit later than I wanted to be in that.
“But once I found it, it felt good.”
And finding it when you don’t have it is what every manager wants to see from a guy who entered his first start of the 2026 season with just 48 big-league innings over eight starts under his belt.
“He was able to go out there and compete, continue to battle, and kept us in the game. Found a way. I thought by the time he got to the fourth inning, he was in a much better rhythm,” Mendoza said, adding later that it just goes to show “that on days that he’s not at his best, he’s still going to find a way to give you a chance to win and that’s what he did today.”
One adjustment McLean made in the final innings was going to his cutter and changeup more — he got Jake Mangum swinging through a low changeup to end a 1-2-3, eight-pitch fourth — and that helped other pitches come along.
“Obviously, I didn’t have much feel early in the game of the sinker, but it started to come back to me later in the game,” the 24-year-old said. “Mixing in some four[-seamers] and some two[-seamers]. Was able to get some quick outs late in the game.”
And the changeup is a pitch McLean is looking to use more, and he was “happy with how it felt in the cold weather.”
“I haven’t thrown it in the cold for a while now, so I was really satisfied with how it played today,” he added.
On the 84-pitch afternoon, he threw six varieties of pitches and got 12 whiffs on 32 swings with 20 called strikes, good for a called strike plus whiff percentage of 38.1 percent.
And it was the changeup (six), curveball (six), and cutter (four) that accounted for half of those called strike plus whiff totals on just 27 offerings.
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