After six scoreless innings against the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday night, Mets starter Nolan McLean reminded everybody just how dominant he can be and proved that his previous start against the Chicago Cubs, where he allowed six earned runs, was a fluke.
In fact, during that start at Citi Field, McLean struck out nine batters and was really only burned on two pitches that both went for homers and accounted for five of the six runs.
For this start, though, the right-hander took the positives of that outing, as well as his start before that in which he didn’t allow an earned run through seven innings against the Cincinnati Reds, and implemented them against the Blue Jays.
“Obviously the result of the last start wasn’t great, but outside of really two swings I felt really good last week,” McLean said. “So I tried to take the positives of what I could. Obviously it’s never fun going in and giving up six runs, but [I] tried to go in and look at the positives and bounce off of that for tonight.”
McLean now seems to be over the struggles he was going through earlier in the season when he allowed 16 runs (13 earned) in nine innings across two starts. And after bursting onto the scene late last season and getting off to a similarly hot start this season, that little stretch McLean went through was his first taste of adversity.
Interim manager Andy Green said after Tuesday’s 3-0 win that he’s been impressed with how the 24-year-old responded to hardship.
“That’s who he is,” Green said. “It’s been fun seeing him kind of bounce back from a tougher stretch. I know last game, a little bit was made out of like a couple of home runs that skewed the line, but [today] he was just mixing his pitches incredibly well.
“He’s got different ways to end at-bats; he was competitive the whole day, he was in the zone the whole day and that was, [from] start to finish, as just clean and dominant as he’s been all year, so it was awesome.”
Since his start on May 25, when he lasted a career-low 3.1 innings against the Cincinnati Reds and allowed seven earned runs, McLean has been on top of his game once again.
Even with the six earned runs allowed last time out against the Cubs, McLean has a 2.79 ERA in five starts this month and has limited his opponent to two earned runs or fewer in five of his last six starts.
The best sign? Outside of the two against Chicago, McLean hasn’t allowed any home runs during that stretch and has started to walk fewer batters, two things that were beginning to plague him.
“I think [when] you go through an entire baseball season for the first time, you’re going to hit stretches where maybe your command wanes a little bit and I think it was mostly that,” Green said of McLean’s rough patch. “So he got to spots where he wasn’t getting his pitches to where he wanted it to and I think that sometimes causes you to go a little bit faster.
“He was able to slow the game down; he’s able to step on the mound and take a deep breath and just go about executing.”
That’s what McLean did on Tuesday night against a Blue Jays team that had never faced him before.
“First off, Luis [Torrens] called a great game,” McLean said. “We had a lot of confidence in all the pitches and that was kind of the goal going in.
“No matter what pitches I threw before, just have the confidence all the way through and trust in the adjustments throughout the game to have a feel if I didn’t have something working early, to be able to find it later. And then it just always goes back to [throwing] offspeed for strikes.”
In particular, McLean thought his sweeper worked for him very well on Tuesday and that he was able to use it to play off the sinker while also mixing in fastballs.
“I’m just trying to get better every time I go out there,” he said. “Find new things that work or old things that I kinda went away from that I should stick by and it always just goes back to landing offspeed. I think that’s a big key for me. Any time I can do that and keep guys off my fastball, it’s really good.”