LOS ANGELES -- Early in Nolan McLean's start Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, he caused Shohei Ohtani to glitch on a sweeper, making the four-time MVP contort his body backward on a pitch that clipped the strike zone. An inning later, Freddie Freeman acted similarly on an inside sinker before lunging at a curveball about a foot from the strike zone.
"He pretty much dominated one of the best lineups in the league,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said.
Those are the types of things that McLean, who is rapidly developing into one of the game’s best pitchers, can do. Thing is, with the way these Mets are going, it almost doesn’t seem to matter.
Despite McLean’s best efforts, the Mets lost their seventh consecutive game on Tuesday, this one 2-1 to the Dodgers. As soon as McLean left the game, Los Angeles hitters pounced on reliever Brooks Raley, who allowed a go-ahead RBI single to Kyle Tucker in the eighth. And that was that.
“He gave us the momentum,” shortstop Francisco Lindor said of McLean, “and we didn’t capitalize on it.”
Staked to a 1-0 lead on Lindor’s 32nd career leadoff homer, McLean gave it back almost immediately in the bottom of the first on a walk, a double and a Freeman RBI groundout. But he didn’t allow anything else, recording 13 consecutive outs from the first through fifth innings.
McLean’s primary problem was not the vaunted Dodgers lineup, but their starting pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who set down 20 in a row in machine-like fashion. Through it all, McLean matched him inning for inning.
“Man, it was [an] old school pitchers’ duel,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
"They were both awesome,” Mendoza added. “Yamamoto was pretty nasty, but Nolan was pretty nasty, too. They went head-to-head. It was inning after inning, batter after batter, pitch after pitch. They made it tough on hitters. It sucks losing that one, especially when you get that type of outing.”
Seemingly growing sharper as the game wore on, McLean struck out the side in the fourth and threw first-pitch strikes to eight consecutive batters from the fifth through seventh innings. He allowed just two hits and two walks with eight strikeouts, lowering his career ERA to 2.13 -- second in Mets history by a pitcher through 12 career starts, ahead of names like Seaver and Koosman and Gooden and deGrom and behind only Terry Leach's 1.70 ERA (which spanned 1981-87). But when McLean finished the seventh inning on 95 pitches, Mendoza chose to remove him, citing a pregame plan to cap the rookie at around 100.
"He did his job there,” Mendoza said. “At that point, I just decided to go with a clean inning [for Raley].”
Whether it was the right decision or not, the result was a lost opportunity for a team that received one of its finest pitching performances of the season to date. The Mets have scored just 10 runs over the life of their seven-game losing streak. Six of them came in a single game last week.
"Honestly, when you’re out there, you don’t really feel the score,” McLean said. “At least in my opinion, you’re just out there trying to execute each pitch. Obviously at any given moment, somebody can clip you for a home run, or things can get haywire. But you’re just trying to execute each pitch.”
McLean is used to this sort of pressure. When the rookie arrived in the Majors last August, he joined a Mets team that had lost 14 of its previous 16 games. Of McLean’s 12 career starts, in fact, eight have come after losses. Time and again, despite McLean’s age and inexperience, the Mets have relied on him to be a stopper. Time and again, despite his age and inexperience, McLean has played that role with aplomb. The Mets won five of the first six games he started following a defeat.
They’ve since lost two in a row in those situations, proving that even McLean at his best cannot always save them.
"You wish we could have gotten it done for him -- and for everyone else here,” Lindor said. "But it’s one of those where he pitched his butt off today. Even though he wasn’t feeling the best probably at the beginning of the game, then all of the sudden he gave us the momentum every single inning. We’ve got to do our best to win games like this.”