As Carlos Mendoza put it after the Mets’ 7-5 win over the Braves on Friday night, the game got “risky” in the second inning.
With the Mets up 2-0 off the back-to-back blasts from Bo Bichette and Juan Soto, starter Nolan McLean struggled. He allowed two runs on three walks and two hits. And more strikingly, the young right-hander threw 42 pitches.
“That was his last hitter there,” Mendoza said of how close he was to pulling McLean in the second. “Again, after 42 pitches, you’re getting in that tricky spot where you’re uncomfortable. Talking to Nolan after that second inning, he had a break, we had a long one offensively. If we had a quick three outs, I don’t think Nolan goes back.”
“You don’t ever really prepare to go throw 40 pitches in an inning,” McLean said. “Once you get that tired out there, you’re trying to piece it together and get those outs, get back in the dugout and try to recover.
“I was pretty tired. Was able to kinda work out of it with minimal runs, minimal damage, which I was happy about.”
The issue for McLean in that inning, and the game as a whole, was his control. The rookie said he was not able to land his offspeed pitches in the zone and credited the Braves hitters for fouling off good pitches.
Mendoza echoed those sentiments.
“He was missing big time arm side with all of his pitches,” he said. “He got pretty tricky there in the second inning, 42 pitches. But he was able to minimize the damage, got out of it and we asked for a couple of more there. It was risky, but we needed him. He lost the strike zone and got behind hitters.”
To McLean’s credit, he settled in. With a 6-2 lead, he allowed just two more baserunners before he was pulled after the fourth inning.
“He competed, he went back out there and was able to give us two more,” Mendoza said.
McLean wound up throwing 93 pitches (55 strikes), allowing the two runs on three hits, four walks, while striking out six. But the 24-year-old isn’t satisfied with just grinding through four innings. He was hoping to go back out for the fifth and was visibly upset when Mendoza told him he was done while in the dugout between innings.
But McLean understands the decision and knows what he must do moving forward.
“I gotta do a better job of, later in the count when they are fouling it off, just keep challenging them,” he said. “Just some pretty close misses there and, then obviously, there were a few walks for bigger misses.”
While it wasn’t pretty, McLean and the Mets will take these wins, knowing they have to climb back to .500 after the hole they dug themselves earlier this season.
“We’ll take ugly victories over clean losses,” McLean said. “So anyway we can get in the win column as many times as we can, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
After Friday’s win, they sit 4.5 games back of the final wild card spot and hope to keep chipping away at that deficit when they face off against the Braves again on Saturday.
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