Mets prospect Nolan McLean trying to make it as a two-way player

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — For any given newly minted professional baseball player, reaching the major leagues is highly unlikely.

Doing so as a pitcher and a hitter, the rarest of positional combinations, is close to impossible.

Nolan McLean wants to try anyway. And the Mets are letting him.

“Not many people do it. I want to stay a kid as long as I can,” McLean said. “Since I was young, it was playing in the field and hitting home runs and pitching and doing everything. Since I was little, I’ve always played multiple sports, multiple positions and I’d like to stay that way as long as I can.”

The Mets selected McLean, 22, as a two-way player out of Oklahoma State in the third round of the draft last summer. In their pre-draft conversations, team officials made it clear to McLean and his family that they would support his dream of doing both.

Now in his first pro spring training, McLean is on double duty. He starts his daily workouts with the pitchers, playing catch and fielding bunts and throwing bullpen sessions. Then he joins the position players for batting practice, he said.

McLean was a reliever in college, but the Mets are building him up as a starting pitcher — which also is a new experience, he noted. That routine naturally helps him balance both. On his non-start days, it’s easier to get some swings in.

“It’s been a little bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to develop both sides of the ball,” he said. “But I think we’ve handled it really well.”

The biggest challenge?

“Building a routine,” he said. “If I can figure out how to build a routine that keeps me healthy and keeps me with enough energy to develop on the mound and in the batter’s box, it’s something that’s obviously fully [possible] with guys like [Shohei] Ohtani doing it now. Hopefully it opens up a lot more people to really try.”

Ohtani, the two-time, two-way MVP with the Angels who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, is the inspiration for a new wave of ballplayers who want to follow in his footsteps. But there is a reason Ohtani’s accomplishments are — without hyperbole — unprecedented: This stuff is hard.

Internally, at least some Mets officials are skeptical of McLean’s two-way future, particularly on the hitting side. They really like him as a pitcher — based on his upper-90s fastball and wicked slider — and like him enough as a person and athlete to see where this experiment goes.

His pro outlook is the reverse of his college track record. In three seasons at Oklahoma State, he was better at the plate than on the mound, with a .957 OPS and 4.55 ERA.

The Mets will face tough questions if, for example, McLean the pitcher is ready to move up a level in the minors but McLean the hitter hasn’t mastered the one he’s at. Would they want to test him on the mound, but let him potentially struggle at the plate against tougher competition?

Because McLean is further along as a pitcher than a hitter in his preseason progression, he appeared as only the former in the Spring Breakout prospect showcase game last week. He tossed a scoreless inning and caught the attention of team owner Steve Cohen.

“Nolan McLean, that’s a new name that’s come up that is kind of exciting,” Cohen said Sunday while giving a brief overview of the Mets’ farm system. “I read somewhere that he had a 3,200 spin, whatever the hell that means. You guys know more about that than I do. That sounds like a lot of spin to me.”

Indeed it is. The higher a pitch’s spin rate, the faster it rotates, the more it moves, the harder it is to hit [usually].

McLean has done a version of this before, arriving at Oklahoma State as a two-sport athlete — football as a walk-on and baseball as a burgeoning star. Football lasted one fall.

“It was extremely important [to try],” McLean said of his two-way pro baseball venture. “I’ve always loved playing every day, getting to stay in a lineup. I’d like to do it as long as I can. I think I’m with a really good organization to help me do that.”

By Tim Healey

timothy.healey@newsday.com@timbhealey

Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.