ANAHEIM, Calif. — Nolan McLean took the mound for the Mets on Saturday night with a chance to keep a fast start to May rolling and help New York take the series from the Angels at Angel Stadium. Reid Detmers started for Los Angeles in a matchup that opened with two pitchers carrying matching 1-2 records but very different recent trends.
McLean came in 1-2 with a 2.55 ERA across six starts, 35 1/3 innings and a 0.849 WHIP, numbers that also included a 2.26 FIP, a 160 ERA+ and 45 strikeouts. His 11.5 K/9 rate underscored why the Mets had leaned on him, and his underlying metrics — a 2.29 xERA, 85.2 mph average exit velocity, a.188 xBA and percentile rankings that placed him in the 94th, 93rd and 91st ranges in those categories — suggested the results were backed by more than luck. He had not started against the Angels before, and no Angels hitter had faced him in a major league game before this one.
Detmers entered at 1-2 with a 4.28 ERA over six starts and 33 2/3 innings, with a 3.23 FIP, a 1.099 WHIP and a 101 ERA+. Three starts earlier, he had held the Yankees to one run over seven innings, but the next two outings brought seven runs, 10 hits and three walks over 11 innings. His 2.95 xERA and 34.1% chase rate, good for the 81st percentile, showed the left-hander still had swing-and-miss life even as the run prevention lagged. He had also seen the Mets once in relief the year before, allowing one run and one hit in one inning.
The Mets arrived with momentum. They won the previous game after trailing late, scoring three runs in the sixth inning to tie it, then getting Ronny Mauricio’s go-ahead homer in the seventh before Devin Williams shut the door in the ninth. The win left New York undefeated in May at the time the game was played, and the series situation gave the night added weight: a chance to keep both the month and the road trip moving in the right direction.
That was the tension in this matchup. The records on the page were similar, but the way each pitcher got there was not. McLean had been suppressing contact and missing bats at a rate that made him look more stable than his win-loss line, while Detmers had flashed sharper outings without fully stringing them together. The broadcast listed for the game was SNY, and the stage was Angel Stadium in Anaheim, where the Mets had already shown they could recover late the night before.
For New York, the broader test was simple: keep turning competitive games into wins. For McLean, it was another chance to extend a start-by-start case that his early numbers are real, not a short-lived run. And for the Angels, it was a familiar task with a new wrinkle — trying to solve a starter they had never seen before while stopping a Mets club that had already shown twice in two days that it would not go quietly.
