There was no great joy Mudville Queens so far this year. The New York Mets have stumbled hard out of the gate and currently hold the worst record in the National League. That’s a far cry from preseason expectations, when they were among the betting favorites to win the World Series. You know all that, no doubt. We wrote about it, as did others. But despite that bad start, it’s not all bad. Mets fans also get to experience my favorite thing in baseball so far this year: imagining Nolan McLean as he plays.
McLean is the kind of pot you’d design in a lab if your primary goal was pure (and incredibly beautiful) pleasure. He puts an absurd amount of spin on the ball, which means his pitches move like they have a small rocket booster running in the middle of home plate (or a small amount of astrophage, Project Hail Mary fans out there). Here’s a visual demonstration of that in our Paired Pitches tool:
It’s actually difficult to fit more than one of McLean’s pitches into the strike zone at the same time. His curveball travels more than any other in baseball, with a comic 48 inches of separation from his sinker. His sweeper is not far behind; it breaks on his glove side by 21 inches, while its sinker fades to the arm side by 18 inches, a horizontal gap of 39 inches. Home plate is 17 inches in diameter. You can do the math.
That’s not how this chart often looks, even for pitchers with high-quality staff. Take Dylan Cease, the answer I used to give when someone asked me who hit the ball the best, back in the days before McLean started playing. He, too, produces a ton of movement. But his chart looks even more ridiculous than McLean’s:
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Stop attacking usually with the strike point straight up. He gets about one plate width of horizontal separation between his broom and the sink. He can spot his slider, changeup, and fastballs away from the same initial trajectory, giving hitters a lot to think about, or cut off a breaking ball that sinks from there. That’s the case with a ton of jars. But McLean makes such a horizontal move that it looks like he’s playing a different game.
Here is an example. In his first start of the year, McLean stepped into a jam and started Ryan O’Hearn with a sinker away:
O’Hearn looked at the plane and read it carefully. The pitch started up the middle and faded away from the plate. So when McLean started the next pitch at the plate, O’Hearn knew it was an easy take. Only it wasn’t:
I wanted to show you what that looks like in the Paired Pitches format, but I can’t. That’s because McLean’s crawler will go down the page if it starts pointing to the same place that crawler started:
Or consider the plight of Nick Gonzales, who faced McLean later in that same game. McLean started him off with a near-perfect shot into the bottom inside corner. He then kept looking forward to Gonzales, but threw punches that broke. When he went for the sweeper, Gonzales couldn’t get enough of his swing:
Think how difficult this can be as a righty. The first pitch was very fast. The next pitch took off on a trajectory that would have hit him in the hip if it broke like the first one, always right. The next one started even inside and yet ended up far away. Good luck, Nick.
That’s not the end of the options available to McLean. Here’s another favorite of mine: using the sweeper inside against the righties. Poor Heliot Ramos thought the pitch was behind him before it returned to the inside edge:
Obviously I should have done a Paired Pitch episode for this:
I don’t think this one was “paired,” really. Ramos didn’t think the ball would end up 20 inches behind him. But because of the amount of horizontal movement he transmits, McLean can create absurd trajectories that hitters don’t have in their mental libraries. You can see Ramos trying to process that ball, failing, and then just taking it. That was the first McLean sweep he’d seen all day, and he couldn’t think of a pitch that did what it did.
Because his sinker moves so much, McLean can throw his cutter, with only an inch of glove side movement, and confuse hitters. Teoscar Hernández thought he got a sinker down the pipe, only to find that his bat wasn’t far enough to hit the ball:
Or, in terms of Paired Pitches:
Here’s one of my favorites from that game – but certainly not one of Freddie Freeman’s favorites. First with a four-seamer to show Freeman one fastball shape, then a scanner that used its extra movement to cut the inside edge, and finally the UFO:
You don’t see Freeman looking lost very often. But he thought he was throwing in the sweeper, a pitch McLean had already shown him three times a day. If you think you’re getting a backdoor sweeper holding the plate for a hit, you might turn to a curveball that never gets close to the spot:
For the most part, curveballs don’t look like other pitches that get out of hand. That “hump” aspect of the shape, created because pitchers have to drive the ball up to compensate for the excessive rest down the field, means hitters have an easier time targeting curves. But they still have to see how the ball flies and make contact, and McLean’s curveball both moves so much and matches his sweep so closely that hitters can’t stop it and can’t hit it. They are rushing at a 36% clip (league average is 30%) and have contact on just 20% of those plays (league average is 50%).
Can you do the same job as other great pitchers? Of course. But I think McLean’s arsenal is very different and thus very interesting to watch. He throws each of his six pitches 10% of the time or more, and throws all of his pitches to every corner of the field. Hitters have to account for everything against him, but his pitches break so badly that wrong guesses have big consequences. If you lean in and go for the breaking ball, you can end up looking like a fool:
I have not shown McLean’s replacement in this article. He uses it more often against lefties, naturally, and mixes it in more sinkers and four-seamers to match them. That makes for a good pitch distribution:
And with hitters trying to deal with that unsolvable riddle, McLean can turn them on their heads even more by mixing in an out-of-plane curveball. Jake Mangum was talking to himself after this sequence, and I don’t blame him:
I’m just scratching the surface here. McLean throws the changes to the far right:
He runs sinkers away from lefties:
On Tuesday night, McLean pitched another show, striking out 10 in 6 2/3 strong innings against the Twins. He gave up three runs, a homer by Byron Buxton that did the most damage. Hey, nobody’s perfect. But the seven hits I haven’t seen yet were pretty good:
Maybe this isn’t the Mets’ year. Heck, it probably won’t be McLean’s year — he was perfect for five against Minnesota before faltering, getting a no-decision, and looking frustrated afterward. But whether you’re working your way up or throwing up the hiccups, I can’t recommend watching McLean’s debut enough. Best show in baseball right now. And for the record, focusing on McLean is like going for everyone else. He has a 2.67 ERA and 2.38 FIP this year. Everything else may fall apart for the Mets, but watching McLean pitch is definitely a silver lining.
