The 3 Hotshot Rookies Who Might Just Save the Mets
Three hours before he was scheduled to throw the game’s first pitch, Jonah Tong stood, barefoot, in the centerfield grass at Citi Field and stared toward home plate, 400 feet away. Tong wore long black shorts and a long-sleeve black t-shirt with “Mets” in script across the chest. His black hair was wet from a shower. Tong balanced on his right leg for a minute. He balanced on his left leg. He practiced his golf swing. The 22-year-old would soon be making his third major league start, a crucial moment in the attempt to save an imploding Mets season. He appeared utterly at ease.
The Mets had been plunging rapidly downhill for three months and were now on the verge of tumbling out of the playoffs. The sudden arrival of Tong and two nearly-as-young rookie pitchers, Nolan McLean and Brandon Sproat, injected a large dose of badly needed energy and optimism.
But if you know Mets history, uplift is nearly always a guarantee of imminent disappointment. Sure enough, things soured quickly in the top of the first inning. Tong was terrible. He had trouble with his control, issuing three walks. When he did throw strikes, he gave up four hits and six runs to the Texas Rangers. Tong’s night was done after just nine batters and 17 minutes, and before he could get three outs. There was a smattering of boos as he walked to the dugout.
His disastrous outing fit nicely, if painfully, into a Mets season that has swung from elation to desperation. Over the winter, they’d signed outfielder Juan Soto, one of the game’s greatest talents, if an enigmatic presence, to the richest-ever contract in pro sports. That helped propel the 2025 Mets payroll to the highest in the game, at $323 million. And for the first three months of the season, the free-spending plan was working: the Mets had the best record in baseball as of June 12. What they had not done, however, was spend big money on starting pitchers. Instead, team executives seemed to put too much stock in the Mets’ high-tech pitching lab, which employs everything from force plates to spin rate data, and supposedly turns bargains into all-stars. In 2024, they’d succeeded with two reclamation projects, Luis Severino and Sean Manaea. This year’s experiment included re-signing Manaea (“I thought that was curious, bringing him back,” a Mets insider says. “Manaea’s arm seem to be hanging by a thread at the end of last year”); acquiring the frequently injured Frankie Montas, whose last truly good season had been in 2021; and signing Clay Holmes, who’d spent the previous six years as a relief pitcher, and turning him into a starter.
Montas blew out his elbow after seven starts. Manaea was hurt, then erratic. Holmes has mostly been okay, though unable to pitch effectively deep into games. Now the Mets, improvising wildly with mere days left to retain their spot in the playoffs, are using Manaea and Holmes to split games, hoping to essentially get one adequate pitcher out of two underperforming starters. Kodai Senga looked like a dominant starter early in the year, then injured a hamstring and never really returned to form. In early September, he was shipped to Triple A Syracuse.
The Mets looked screwed. They’d been lousy for three months, compiling a 26-37 record that was lowlighted by a pair of seven-game losing streaks. Then McLean, Tong, and Sproat, were summoned from the minors by Mets’ president of baseball operations David Stearns, the baseball wunderkind who last year assembled a likable Mets squad that nearly reached the World Series. “I mean, I think we had confidence that we were going to have an influx of young pitching at some point this year,” Stearns told me while standing on the field in Philadelphia before the Mets took on the first-place Phillies. “I don’t know that we necessarily would have predicted having three of our starting pitchers making their major league debuts for us in a pennant race in September, but that’s where we are.”
That night, the 24-year-old McLean would turn in his fifth consecutive strong start, only to suffer his first big league loss as the Mets were shut out. McLean’s physical abilities have always drawn raves. “You will not find a stronger, more athletic man,” says his college coach, Oklahoma State’s Josh Holliday. “Put a pickleball paddle or a golf club in his hands and he’d get real good real fast.” But it’s his aptitude for pitching that may be even more freakish. McLean started out playing both baseball and football at OSU and threw a minimal number of innings in college; during his first two years in the minors with the Mets, McLean was a designated hitter on days he didn’t take the mound. He has been a full-time pitcher for slightly more than a year, yet makes in-game adjustments worthy of a grizzled veteran. McLean is able to throw six pitches; his signature is a sweeper than can break as much as 22 inches horizontally. In his third big league start, though, he noticed the Detroit Tigers, one of this season’s top teams, laying off his breaking pitches and instead leaned heavily on fastballs, giving up just two runs and getting the victory. “He knows what it’s like to stand in there against a professional pitcher,” says AJ Sager, who was the Mets pitching coach in Double A Binghamton last season and in Triple A Syracuse this season. “That’s rare, and it’s a big advantage, because Nolan can process that information really quickly.”
On top of all that, McLean is an above average singer, according to Mets reliever Brooks Raley. “We have the rookies sing on the bus. McLean’s an entertainer,” Raley says. “He did ‘Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue’ and got everyone whooping and hollering.”
Sproat, 25, was supposed to be the organization’s top pitching prospect, but he had to overcome a stretch of wildness this summer and was the last of the trio to be called to New York, where he has pitched well (and has defeated Raley at cribbage). Tong, who looks about 12 years old, is the most intriguing personality. He throws with a violent grace, jerking his head to the left in order to extend his right arm high into the air, a delivery yielding a 95-mile-per-hour four-seam fastball that appears to defy gravity and rise as it approaches home plate — an effect the metricsheads call induced vertical break.
Off the field, Tong is transparently, compellingly emotional. Two hours after he’d been removed from that ugly start against Texas, he was still struggling with his composure in the locker room, barely holding back tears as he answered questions from reporters. Six days later, though, Tong bounced back brilliantly, throwing his fastball aggressively and often, mowing down the San Diego Padres,
The Mets are doing what they can to reduce the pressure, tightly limiting media access to the three young pitchers. The protectiveness is, in part, an attempt to learn from “Generation K,” the much-hyped mid-nineties trio of Mets pitchers Jason Isringhausen, Bill Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson, who failed to live up to the hype due to injuries, unrealistic expectations, and assorted weirdness. Jeremy Hefner, the Mets pitching coach, believes the current group has a maturity beyond their years. “You could put them in a men’s league game in Central Park and they’re gonna be the same as they are out here,” Hefner says, looking weary while standing along the right field foul line. “These guys know themselves.”
The three are also leaning on one another. McLean and Sproat were roommates in Syracuse, and when McLean was called up, Tong moved into the apartment with Sproat. Now they’re all bunking in a Queens hotel, not far from Citi Field, as they try to salvage the Mets’ season. If the Mets reach the playoffs — and with an 80-74 record, they look quite likely to sneak in — the trio, slightly more than two months removed from facing the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, will likely be handed the majority of playoff starts, with McLean on target to pitch game one in the first round.
“Maybe you could expect one young player to carry a substantial load at this point in a season, but three?” a senior executive with a rival, playoff-bound major league team says. “The only thing I’m sure of with the Mets is that if you give David Stearns five years with Steve Cohen’s resources, he’s going to build a dominant team. What you’re seeing is a transition taking place.”
If McLean, Sproat, and Tong survive this month, that is.