​New York Mets starter Nolan McLean is having a hot July, and he’s starting to go deeper into games. Yesterday McLean threw a gem to lead the Mets to a 6-1 win over the Philadelphia Phillies, as he hurled six scoreless innings and struck out ten. He’s now gone 17 straight innings without allowing an earned run, and Phillies hitters knew what they were up against. “He’s one of the best in the game,” Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm said in a followup piece written by Anthony DiComo of MLB.com. “He was pretty sharp today, obviously.McLean has six potentially devastating pitches, and he likes to use them all. He’s an absolute savant when it comes to his ability to manipulate and spin the baseball, but McLean said the key to his sudden surge has been his ability to use his four-seam fastball. “I try to use it as much as possible because I just want to go deeper into games,” McLean said. “Getting whiffs is great and all, but it’s really hard to get a ton of whiffs and go deep into games. You’ve got to have soft contact in there.”This shift represents a big change for McLean. He’s had games where his breaking ball command was sketchy, which resulted in McLean throwing far too many pitches and getting behind in counts. Yesterday he was ahead of hitters for most of the day, and the results were impressive. “With him, he can win up. He can win with spin down. He can win east to west,” Mets interim manager Andy Green said. “And him doing that multiple ways in an outing makes it really tough for hitters the second and third time through the order to know how he’s going to attack them. So, really impressive. When he’s filling up the strike zone, it’s a lot of fun.”It’s also a lot of fun when McLean gets runs to work with, and that was the case yesterday. He’s had nail-biter starts where he gets a run or two to work with and has to hold the fort and hope for the best, but yesterday shortstop Francisco Lindor led the charge with three hits, including a two-run homer in the first that put the Mets in charge early. It was a different way of winning games for the Mets, who have a tendency to do things the hard way. “He was awesome today,” Green said. “He was Francisco Lindor. That’s who we want him to be.”