Nolan McLean Feels Like a Video Game Pitcher

There hasn’t been much joy in 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 far from what was expected before the season, when they were among the betting favorites to win the World Series. You know all that, undoubtedly. We’ve written about it, as have others. But despite that rough start, it’s not all bad. Mets fans also get to experience my favorite thing in baseball so far this year: thinking along with Nolan McLean as he pitches.

McLean is the kind of pitcher you’d design in a lab if your main goal was sheer whimsical delight (he’s also incredibly good, of course). He imparts a ridiculous amount of spin on the ball, which means his pitches move like they have a tiny rocket booster activating midway to home plate (or a minuscule amount of astrophage, for the Project Hail Mary fans out there). Here’s a visual representation of that in our Paired Pitches tool:

It’s actually hard to fit more than one of McLean’s pitches in the strike zone at the same time. His curveball moves more than any other in baseball, with a comical 48 inches of separation from his sinker. His sweeper isn’t far behind; it breaks to his glove side by 21 inches, while his sinker fades arm side by 18 inches, a 39-inch horizontal gap. Home plate is 17 inches wide. You can do the math.

That’s not how this chart normally looks, even for pitchers with elite secondaries. Take Dylan Cease, the answer I used to give when someone asked me who spun the ball best, back in the days before McLean debuted. He, too, generates a ton of movement. But his chart looks far less absurdly spaced than McLean’s:

Cease generally attacks the strike zone vertically. He gets about one plate’s width of horizontal separation between his sweeper and sinker. He can spot his slider, changeup, and fastballs in the zone off of the same initial trajectory, which gives hitters a lot to think about, or snap off a breaking ball that vanishes downward from there. That’s the case for a ton of pitchers. But McLean generates so much horizontal movement that it looks like he’s playing a different game.

Here’s an example. In his first start of the year, McLean got into a jam and started Ryan O’Hearn with a sinker away:

O’Hearn watched it fly by and got a good read. The pitch started over the middle and then faded all the way off the plate. So when McLean started the next pitch off the plate, O’Hearn knew it was an easy take. Only it wasn’t:

I wanted to show you how that looks in the Paired Pitches format, but I can’t. That’s because McLean’s sinker would land off the page if he started it aimed at the same point where that sweeper started:

Or consider the plight of Nick Gonzales, who faced McLean later in that same game. McLean started him with a near-perfect sinker, on the low inside corner. Then he kept aiming further towards Gonzales, but throwing pitches that broke away. By the time he went to a sweeper away, Gonzales simply couldn’t get enough of his bat on the ball:

Imagine how difficult this would be as a righty. The first pitch ran in sharply. The next pitch started on a trajectory that would hit him in the hip if it broke like that first one, only to stay true. The next one started even further inside and yet ended up away. Good luck, Nick.

That’s hardly the end of the options available to McLean. Here’s another favorite of mine: using the sweeper inside against righties. Poor Heliot Ramos thought the pitch was behind him right before it veered back to the inside edge:

Obviously I had to make a Paired Pitch plot of this one:

I don’t think this one was “paired,” exactly. Ramos didn’t think that ball was going to end up 20 inches behind him. But thanks to the sheer amount of horizontal movement he’s imparting, McLean can create absurd initial trajectories that hitters simply don’t have in their mental libraries. You can see Ramos try to process that ball, fail, and just take it. That was the first McLean sweeper he’d seen all day, and he couldn’t conceive of a pitch doing what it did.

Because his sinker moves so much, McLean can throw his cutter, which averages only an inch of glove-side movement, and still befuddle batters. Teoscar Hernández thought he got a sinker right down the pipe, only to find out that his bat wasn’t quite long enough to hit a cutter away:

Or, in Paired Pitches terms:

Here’s another of my favorites from that game – but certainly not one of Freddie Freeman’s favorites. First a four-seamer away to show Freeman one fastball shape, then a sinker that used its extra movement to clip the inner edge, and then finally a UFO:

You don’t see Freeman look that lost very often. But he thought he was swinging at a sweeper, a pitch that McLean had already showed him three times on the day. If you think you’re getting a backdoor sweeper that holds the plate for a called strikeout, you might swing at a curveball that never approaches the zone:

For the most part, curveballs don’t look like other pitches out of the hand. That characteristic “hump” shape, generated because pitchers have to aim the ball higher to adjust for the pitch’s extreme downward break, means that hitters have an easier time identifying curves. But they still have to figure out the ball’s flight path and then make contact, and McLean’s curveball both moves so much and resembles his sweeper closely enough that batters can’t lay off and also can’t hit it. They’re chasing at a 36% clip (the league average is 30%) and making contact on a mere 20% of those swings (league average is 50%).

Could you do a similar exercise with other great pitchers? Sure. But I think that McLean’s arsenal is simply more varied and thus more fun to watch. He throws each of his six pitches 10% of the time or more, and he throws all of his pitches to every corner of the zone. Batters have to account for everything against him, but his pitches break by so much that guessing wrong has huge consequences. If you’re leaning and looking for a breaking ball, you might end up looking foolish:

I haven’t showed McLean’s changeup yet in this article. He uses it more frequently against lefties, naturally, and mixes in plenty of sinkers and four-seamers to pair with it. That makes for a pretty pitch distribution:

And with batters trying to deal with that unsolvable riddle, McLean can turn them on their heads even more by mixing in an off-plane curveball. Jake Mangum was muttering to himself after this sequence, and I don’t blame him:

I’m just scratching the surface here. McLean throws right-on-right changeups:

He runs sinkers away against lefties:

Tuesday night, McLean put on another show, with 10 strikeouts in 6 2/3 strong innings against the Twins. He gave up three runs, with a Byron Buxton homer accounting for the majority of the damage. Hey, nobody’s perfect. But the seven strikeouts I haven’t shown you yet were mighty pretty:

Maybe this isn’t the Mets’ year. Heck, maybe it won’t be McLean’s year — he was perfect through five against Minnesota before faltering down the stretch, departing with a no decision, and he was visibly frustrated afterwards. But whether he’s operating at peak form or pitching through some hiccups, I can’t recommend watching McLean’s starts highly enough. It’s the best show in baseball right now. And for the record, pitching through hiccups for McLean is like cruising for pretty much everyone else. He has a 2.67 ERA and 2.38 FIP this year. Everything else might be falling apart for the Mets, but getting to watch McLean pitch is quite the silver lining.