Together, Jonah Tong and Nolan McLean cover every point on the compass.
The Mets' two phenoms are opposites in how they pitch. But in the New York rotation, they complement each other perfectly. Tong and McLean pitch in all four directions: Tong, north and south; McLean, east and west.
It's a testament to the Mets' pitching lab that the team has developed two star pitching prospects who both have outlier stuff while preserving their unique styles.
"I think that's the cool part about the Mets organization as a whole: It's just their ability to develop completely opposite sides of the spectrum," McLean said. "It's cool that they're able to not cookie-cutter everybody, and give us tons of options for our arsenal."
Tong and McLean are both suddenly keys to the Mets' playoff aspirations. Here's how the Mets got two potential future aces to the Majors at the same time by keeping their individual electricity intact.
Tong is an old-school power pitcher in a 22-year-old's body, delivering explosive fastballs, true 12-6 curves and fading changeups from one of the most extreme over-the-top deliveries in baseball. He looks like Tim Lincecum but he drops and drives like Tom Seaver.
"I think that, yeah, my slot does kind of trend toward more old-school type pitches, but I think they're what work for me," Tong said. "The Mets have honestly let me just be myself, and I'm forever grateful for that. They've taken me underneath their wing and showed me the world of player development, which is … vast. It's a very big world."
The 24-year-old McLean is a new-school, low-arm-slot spin king who has the natural gifts to throw insane Wiffle ball breaking pitches, but who has also absorbed baseball's latest pitching trends like a sponge since joining the Mets organization.
Their arsenals are opposites because of their pitching motions. Tong pitches from a 64-degree arm slot, as measured by Statcast -- the most over-the-top of any Major League starting pitcher. McLean's arm angle is just 27 degrees, more than twice as sidearm as Tong's. He releases the ball from 3.64 feet toward the third-base side of the rubber, the widest release point of any right-handed starter who's thrown as many pitches as he has.
Tong's over-the-top arm angle lends itself to a north-south pitching repertoire -- pitches that move up and down in the zone. McLean's more sidearm delivery lends itself to an east-west repertoire -- pitches that break side-to-side. And Tong and McLean have each embraced their natural styles.
So have the Mets, who have helped the duo optimize their arsenals with the pitches that work best for them. Organization philosophies are important, but so is tailoring development plans to each pitcher's best qualities. Tong and McLean are proof of how that works.
"[What the Mets have done] is all just based on what my arsenal looks like and then building stuff to support me," Tong said. "Nolan's a great pitcher, and he has a lot of success doing what he does -- ironically, on a completely different angle. Which I think is what makes pitching unique, right?"
Tong is particularly eccentric. As Tong has explained before, his Lincecum-esque pitching motion came from a childhood rebellion against his dad, who wouldn't let him throw sidearm.
"Around that time, Chris Sale was getting really popular with the White Sox," Tong recalled. "I was like, 'You know what, that'd be cool -- Chris Sale does it.' My dad said, 'No, you can't do that. That's bad for you.' I said, 'OK, so what happens if I go all the way to the other extreme?' And then it evolved itself into what it is now."
Highest arm angle as SP, 2025
- Jonah Tong: 64 degrees
- Chris Flexen: 62 degrees
- Bradley Blalock: 62 degrees
- Tobias Myers: 61 degrees
- Mitchell Parker: 60 degrees
Tong's delivery, besides just evoking the Giants' two-time Cy Young Award winner, is great for generating rise on his four-seam fastball, because he can backspin the baseball very easily, and for hammering his curveball straight down.
After one big league start, Tong leads all MLB pitchers in four-seam fastball rise. Tong averaged 21 inches of induced vertical break on his heater in his MLB debut -- higher IVB means more rise -- which currently tops Statcast's pitch movement leaderboard. (At Triple-A, he was averaging 19 inches of induced rise at Triple-A, which would be top-tier in MLB, too.)
Tong, who is 6-foot-1, also releases that 95-96 mph rising fastball from seven feet in front of the rubber, and that extension means it gets on the hitter even faster.
"It's probably the most electric fastball I've seen from that type of delivery, as well," McLean recently told SNY's Steve Gelbs about Tong, "with all the funk and creativity and uniqueness he has going on."
The polar opposite of that fastball is Tong's 12-6 curveball. It drops almost as much as his fastball rises -- Tong averaged over 17 inches of induced drop on his curve in his first Mets start, which puts it on the high end of MLB curves in vertical movement, alongside curveball specialists like Max Fried and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
But the pitcher who was an inspiration for Tong when he was working on his curve in the Minors was Clayton Kershaw. Not just because Kershaw's curveball is a legendary pitch, but because, like Tong, Kershaw is a straight over-the-top thrower whose curve has true 12-6 action.
At the time Tong was drafted by the Mets, Kershaw was pitching from around a 60-degree arm slot, nearly equivalent to Tong's but from the left side. Tong's movement profile now is similar to Kershaw's fastball-curveball combo, too: strong vertical break coupled with very little horizontal break.
"I almost think his north-south approach is kind of universal," Tong said. "And being so over-the-top, it was interesting to see how he played it. How I could potentially take my game from it."
The Mets let Tong's four-seamer and curveball blossom. Then they helped him make a key tweak to his third out pitch: his changeup. Like Lincecum, whose changeup was his No. 1 strikeout pitch in his Cy Young seasons, Tong plays his own nasty changeup off his rising four-seamer for K's.
What the Mets did was change the way Tong holds the baseball to achieve the best movement he can.
Tong got his changeup grip -- a "Vulcan" grip with split fingers like the Star Trek salute -- from Instagram. That's not the Mets' doing. But he used to throw that changeup with his fingers across the horseshoe of the baseball in a four-seam grip. The Mets had him rotate the ball in his hand so his fingers now lie along the horseshoe in a two-seam grip.
The switch in orientation allows the baseball to catch the seams as it moves through the air, and adds both depth and horizontal movement to the pitch without Tong having to alter his over-the-top release.
"My delivery definitely has its limits at times when it comes to developing pitches quickly," Tong said. "There's gonna be an adjustment period -- so there are certain profile pitches that I haven't yet explored."
Knowing that, the Mets made a small but significant adjustment to bring out the best in the arsenal of a young pitcher with pitching mechanics that no other young pitcher has.
And you should see what they've done with McLean.
McLean, like Tong, has one big unique trait as a pitcher. For him, it's spin. But until he got to the Mets organization, he wasn't taking full advantage of it.
McLean has elite-elite spin rate. His sweeper is averaging 2,943 rpm, and his curveball is averaging 3,267 rpm. McLean has the highest-spin curveball in MLB this season, and one of the highest-spin sweepers.
Highest curveball spin rate, 2025
- Nolan McLean: 3,267 rpm
- Ryan Pressly: 3,240 rpm
- Seth Lugo: 3,237 rpm
- Phil Maton: 3,180 rpm
- Charlie Morton: 3,168 rpm
Throwing two high-spin pitches from a much more sidearm arm slot than Tong means that McLean can get huge amounts of horizontal break. His sweeper averages 16 inches of break -- that's a lot for a sweeper as hard as McLean's, which sits at 85 mph and can touch 88. Dustin May is the only other pitcher with an 85-plus mph sweeper and as much movement as McLean.
McLean's curveball, at 80 mph, averages over 18 inches of glove-side break -- one of only three MLB curveballs with that much along with Phil Maton and Landon Roupp -- but he spins it differently enough from his sweeper to induce more vertical movement along with it, so the two pitches don't look the same to hitters.
"Just where I'm throwing from, the east-west is easy," McLean said. "I think [my arm slot] definitely helps the sweeper a ton -- I'm rotating pretty aggressively, so that's definitely beneficial for the sweeper. And then the curveball is a hand manipulation thing, really just trying to rip through it.
"Honestly, they don't tend to blend too much, because from where I'm throwing, the curveball's creating enough depth compared to the rest of my stuff."
McLean's sweeper and curveball are so good that he's been able to throw them a combined 45% of the time in the Majors -- even more than he's throwing his fastballs. The sweeper is his most-used pitch, and the curve is his top strikeout pitch. But he didn't develop those two pitches into what they are now until the Mets drafted him in 2023.
As McLean told MLB.com's Anthony DiComo, when he came out of Oklahoma State, he'd never even heard of a sweeper, which has become one of MLB's trendiest new pitch types over the last few years. Now he's throwing one of MLB's nastiest.
You can't teach 3,000 rpm spin rates, and the Mets didn't. But they did help McLean refine his spin into a wicked breaking-ball tandem. McLean credits Mets director of pitching development Eric Jagers and Double-A pitching coach Dan McKinney for working with him to find the right seam orientations for his different pitch types. His grip adjustments helped him add velocity to his breaking pitches while keeping their Frisbee movement.
"It was a lot about just using the spin to my advantage," McLean said. "Luckily, from what I understand, the more you spin it, you have more room for error to create consistent shapes.
"I use the curveball and sweeper off of each other. Or at least try to. Because they start on the same line; one just has probably 15 inches more drop than the other. So I try to mix and match them, just to create different eye levels and angles for the hitters."
While Tong pairs his four-seamer with his curveball and changeup to create a north-south repertoire, McLean pairs his sweeper and curveball with a sinker and changeup that run in the opposite direction to create his east-west repertoire.
McLean harnessed two more modern pitching concepts for his arm-side pitches. His sinker is a "seam shift" sinker. His changeup is a "kick" change.
Seam shift in pitching is the idea that the way the seams of the baseball are lined up affects how it moves through the air. If a pitcher releases the ball with the seams oriented a certain way, the pitch will move more, and more unpredictably, than it would from its spin alone.
For McLean, the way he positions the seams on his sinker shifts the pitch movement to be perfectly mirroring his sweeper, with 16 inches of arm-side run from left to right.
And the kick change? That's just a new variety of changeup that helps pitchers who find it more natural to turn their wrist outward for breaking pitches than inward for offspeed pitches. Pitchers like McLean. The grip for a kick change lets those pitchers create the depth they need to throw an effective changeup when they would normally have trouble doing so.
McLean's actually came from watching video of his now rotation-mate Clay Holmes, who added a kick change when he converted from a reliever to a starter with the Mets.
"I was like, 'I need something that moves right,'" McLean said. "The first couple were just absolute bangers and I'm like, 'OK, this is gonna be sick.' And then you kind of lose feel of it for a while. That's where the development process kicks in, of just sticking with it, trusting the movement and what you're seeing with your eyes and being able to execute it in the game."
With his sinker and changeup, McLean now has two left-to-right pitches to use in concert with his two right-to-left breaking pitches.
Armed with all those pitches, McLean studied Zack Wheeler for his plan of attack. Wheeler is also a low-arm slot pitcher and an ace McLean respects for his consistency. McLean has always loved Wheeler's arsenal, which also features a wipeout sweeper-curveball combo.
In fact, Wheeler is one of the most similar pitchers to McLean by his velocity and movement profile, according to Statcast's pitcher affinity scores.
McLean might not have known what sweepers, seam shift and kick changes were when he was dominating in college, but all those concepts have become integral to him dominating in the bigs. He developed the arsenal that could forge his path to success with the Mets, just like Tong. And those paths had to be different.
"He is probably one of most talented pitchers I've ever seen," Tong said of McLean. "And it was cool watching him through his development. It's hard, because, like, I wouldn't say that we pick up anything [from each other's arsenals] or that we can compare each other, because we're two very different pitchers. But I'm just grateful for his friendship."