Baseball Season Has Started*

“Could be, like, where I’m at on the ball too, but…”

With that fragment, Nolan McLean kicked off the baseball season. Ask a dozen baseball fans when they think the season starts, and you’re likely to get five or six different answers. Maybe you think the season starts on Opening Day, or with the first showcase series before Opening Day, or when spring training games start, or when your local broadcast starts actually airing spring training games, or on the first day of spring training, or when pitchers and catchers report, or on truck day. Or maybe you just think that all of these milestones deserve to be celebrated in their own right as we creep out of the cold toward actual, meaningful baseball. Nobody’s wrong, but some of us believe that baseball begins when grainy cellphone footage of players performing baseball-related activities on the backfields in Florida and Arizona starts trickling into our social media feeds. If you count yourself among that cohort, then congratulations. Baseball season has started.

First sight of Nolan McLean ????? atmlb.com/4qDlxyw

— New York Mets (@mets.com) 2026-02-02T18:00:19.780Z

McLean was on the mound at Clover Park, the Mets’ spring training facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida to throw some sort of bullpen session alongside fellow prospect Jonah Tong. Someone on staff captured footage of the two young players pitching, and both videos went up on social media in the early afternoon on Monday. The videos were taken vertically, then cropped down to an awkward 672×768 pixel ratio, but they featured the loud pop of ball meeting glove, and that’s enough. By virtue of being posted first, McLean’s kicked off the season.

Pitchers and catchers don’t officially report for another nine days, but McLean and Tong were far from alone in Port St. Lucie. Not long after those first two videos went up, SNY posted a brief interview with Tong and a video showing the “highlights” from Freddy Peralta’s first day in camp. Please don’t throw away 109 seconds of your precious life on this video. The highlights consisted of Peralta shaking hands with a couple people and playing catch – never without at least one other person between him and the camera – while some blues-flavored stock music struggled to make itself heard over the sound of a stiff breeze wreaking havoc on a microphone. This is what the start of baseball season looks like:

Just look at Peralta’s smile, or at least what you can see of it behind that guy in the blue Mets hoodie (and that other guy in the blue Mets hoodie).

Tong’s interview was perfectly anodyne. He answered a couple softballs and then artfully navigated a question about the Mets’ trading away his friend Brandon Sproat for Peralta. Still, it wasn’t exactly riveting television. The best way to watch it is to crank it up to several times the original speed so that you can track the progress of the guy in the bright white hat as he walks along the outfield fence in the background.

But McLean’s video is the reason we’re here. I spent pretty much all of Monday afternoon letting it wash over me on a loop. As I write this sentence now, the audio is still playing in the background over and over again. The video shows McLean throwing two pitches. The whole thing is 11.1 seconds long, meaning that over the course of one hour, it will repeat 324 times. It’s safe to say that I’ve either watched or heard it at least a thousand times. I wanted to let it bore itself as deeply into my brain as possible so that I could convey to you what the beginning of the season looked like, sounded like, felt like.

For starters, someone was talking in the background the whole time. It might have been a radio. It was 55 degrees and sunny in Port St. Lucie. The mound at a spring training facility is more of a berm than anything else, one extra-wide pitcher’s mound that stretches for yards and yards. The one in Port St. Lucie is wide enough to accommodate either five or six pitching rubbers.

McLean wore his cleats and a regular season Mets cap, so if you glimpsed only the very top or bottom of him, you might have thought he was ready for a real game. He was casual in between, sporting blue shorts over black compression tights and a long-sleeve performance t-shirt. Behind him on the mound stood a coach in uniform pants and a bulky team jacket and Tong, dressed down in a Pitching Ninja t-shirt and the same Mets shorts as McLean. Tong wore no tights. His quadriceps would not have looked out of place in the World’s Strongest Man competition, and when his bare shins caught the midday sun they were the brightest thing in the frame. His left arm pinned his glove to his side. His massive calves made his ankles look positively dainty.

McLain’s one line, “Could be, like, where I’m at on the ball too, but…” was clearly part of a larger conversation with his catcher about his changeup grip. He was adjusting the grip as he spoke. Tong appeared to be throwing at something like 50% in his own video, but McLean wasn’t just warming up. He was working, and the other thing standing on the mound behind him was an Edgertronic camera on a tripod. A television set back against the chain link fence appeared to show a live feed from a Trackman unit, presumably on its own tripod behind the catcher. With each pitch, a blurry black wipe swept from right to left across the screen as the unit processed the offering. Both PitchingBot and Eric Longenhagen see the changeup as McLean’s worst pitch, and if he can figure out a way to raise it to the same level as his others, it might put him on an entirely different trajectory.

As he spoke and felt for the right seam, the right-handed McLean settled himself on the mound, hunched ever so slightly with his shoulders rounded. He held the ball in his pitching hand and pushed his glove into his front hip. He signaled for a changeup, keeping the glove open wide and flicking it up until the palm was parallel to the ground, then pushing it gently toward the catcher before pulling back. He came set for half a Mississippi. The pitching coach shifted his weight from his left foot to his right, then back again. Tong crossed his hands at the waist and bowed his head as if to show respect for the forthcoming pitch.

McLean raised his front leg and performed his usual mid-delivery tic, removing the ball from the glove then patting it against the palm once before swinging his arm down, back, and up. As his left leg reached down and found the front of the mound, his 6-foot-2 frame eased toward the plate and the right arm finally slung forward. Like many pitchers with low arm slots, McLean tends to wrap his arm all the way around his body as he follows through. Once it’s traveled as far as it can, it bounces back across his body and his wrist pulls upward. It’s like every pitch ends with a changeup sign. “Yeah,” he said with satisfaction as his arm swung back around.

Smash cut to the second pitch, which didn’t go as well. McLean’s arm action was faster and the ball appeared to have a higher release angle. As his right leg landed, he executed little step-ball-change of frustration and emitted a faint expletive that the Mets media team somehow missed. I’m 95% sure about this. The first baseball footage of the 2026 season features Nolan McLean saying the F-word under his breath.

The thing that really makes it a classic spring training video, though, is the bush that borders the bullpen area. The hallmark of these videos is graininess and general lack of polish. The awkward cropping and the low resolution help in that department, but the bush does the heavy lifting. It blocks your view of McLean’s lower half and takes up roughly a quarter of the frame. It looks a little shaggy right now, and if you stare at it long enough you can kind of see a face in the hollows where the leaves haven’t grown as thick.

More importantly, in the clip of the first pitch, the camera isn’t actually focused on McLean at all. It’s focused in the foreground. On the bush. Only on the second pitch is the bush blurry, rather than the ballplayer.

This is how you know baseball has truly started. We’ve got the ball hitting the mitt with abominable sound quality, questionable editing decisions, downright confusing aspect ratios, and camerawork that focuses on the most important thing of all: the bush in front of a baseball player. Truly, the 2026 season is off to a flying start.