Mets' Nolan McLean still learning all the angles of pitching in the majors
The Mets' Nolan McLean pitches during the first inning against Atlanta at Citi Field on June 12, 2026. Credit: Jim McIsaac
When Nolan McLean burst onto the scene in 2025, there were all the usual caveats. He’s young. Don’t expect him to be this team’s savior. He’s still got growing to do.
But McLean needed no caveats. Although he didn’t save that Mets team, he did everything in his power to shove them over the threshold. He was the King of Spin, with a curveball that rotated more than anyone’s in baseball, and a sweeper that wasn’t too far behind. It was more than that, though — he had a frustratingly large arsenal and the pitchability to keep hitters off balance; he threw hard and he had a poise that belied his years.
All of those things didn’t disappear this year. His curveball still leads the league in rotations per minute. That sweeper still showcases nasty horizontal movement. He still looks poised, even though things aren’t going his way. And he’s actually throwing slightly harder than he did before — a few notches up on his sinker, four-seamer, curveball, cutter and changeup.
But a lot of things did change.
From the outset, this season was different. Although Freddy Peralta was the presumed ace, there was every expectation that McLean, who pitched to a 2.08 ERA in eight games last year, would continue his ascent to frontline pitcher.
But the results have been inconsistent. He’s got a 4.01 ERA over 14 starts and was visibly frustrated when he only completed four innings against Atlanta last week. McLean had an especially ugly three-game stretch in May, when he allowed 19 runs (16 earned), hit five batters, let up five homers and walked seven in just 16 innings.
So what’s going on?
“I don’t think [hitters] are necessarily adapting to him,” pitching coach Justin Willard told Newsday recently. “I think they sold out to one plan and it was a really good plan and he wasn’t able to execute away from that plan. First and foremost, I think his ability to attack hitters, get in zone in 3-and-2 counts is of utmost importance and then using the sweeper as a landable spin pitch, as well as [executing] with some fastball location is really going to drive his success moving forward.”
But also, McLean is 24 and has pitched less than 125 major-league innings. There’s room for growth, and Willard believes he has the qualities to embrace that challenge.
“He’s got the mentality of the ultimate competitor,” Willard said. “He doesn’t care who’s in the box, he thinks he’s the best pitcher in the world and he’s going to give it his best shot.”
Looking at McLean’s outings, there are a few things that stand out. McLean changed his arm angle this year; coming from a three-quarter slot, he moved up slightly, going from 27 degrees to 32, and for something as finicky as pitching, those five degrees do matter.
“It’s just more of a natural slot for him,” Willard said of the change. A higher arm angle generates more velocity, too, “and then it’s trying to figure out, OK, how do we make the adjustments to the pitches that he has to maximize his ability to get in the zone and limit some of those misses.”
Willard acknowledged that something like that could affect his ability to land his secondary pitches “probably a little bit, but there’s also some other mechanical issues” they’re working on — including his going more cross-body than he sometimes intends to.
Put that all together, and it means that McLean has been momentarily sapped of his greatest strength: the way his pitches move. That’s not an issue with his hard stuff — his sinker has a 12-run value, making it one of the best pitches in baseball — but his spin pitches, and his sweeper in particular, is doing him few favors. About 57% of the sweepers he’s thrown have landed outside of the strike zone, compared to 46.3% last year, and when you couple that with hitters understanding that you feast on deception, it makes it harder to survive.
But McLean knows that, and he’s workshopping it.
“I’m just not landing offspeed pitches,” McLean said after that game against Atlanta Friday (he allowed two runs on three hits with four walks and six strikeouts, but needed 93 pitches to complete four innings). “They were doing a pretty good job of fouling off some good pitches as well.”
That’s pretty much been the trend.
“There are a few things where] he needs to get better,” Carlos Mendoza said before McLean’s May 31 start. “It’s his ability to compete in the strike zone with his secondary pitches — the sweeper, the slider, because we’ve seen teams that, once they recognize that he’s not about to land those pitches in the strike zone, they’re just going to stay aggressive on the hard stuff . . . We know how elite he is at spinning the baseball, but he’s also got to be able to compete in there in the strike zone.”
Willard remains confident that this is an ongoing process. The Mets were quick to temper expectations last year, but McLean’s success made that nearly impossible this season. But this is still very much a developing player with highly coveted tools.
“He’s a guy that has an incredible fastball in terms of the power you can generate with it, and then the ability to spin the ball like very few in this game,” he said. “He really has to rely on the ability to land both the fastball and the offspeed pitches in the zone to generate or get to two-strike counts.”
Of the sweeper, “he’s kind of not had the feel for it since the end of spring training,” Willard said. “That’s something that we’ve really been trying to focus on. There are some mechanical things going that we hopefully adjusted, and we’ll continue to move forward.”
On Wednesday, McLean will get another shot at putting those tweaks to work, and potentially take one more step in the maturing process that, despite his early success, still must continue.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
