Hopefully I can have a full-on Electric Meter done for McDonald after his start tonight, but for now I wanted to do a shorter post breaking down his season to date. As you’re no doubt aware, McDonald has looked an awful lot like he did in August after his rough April start this season. Since his April 27th start against the Giants, he’s made six starts and his stat line looks like this:
34 2/3 IP, 33 K, 12 BB, 4 HR, 31 H, 10 R, 10 ER, .240/.305/.372 against, 34 GB, 63 FB
That’s about where I’d set my highest expectations for McDonald this season: a lot of strikeouts, a manageable walk-rate, and a lot of flyballs but not too many home runs.
Without really digging into the PitchFX and numbers too much, you can see from the PitchFX on his FanGraphs page that he’s not really doing anything differently from last year, either. He’s throwing a fastball that’s being classified as a two-seamer, but it’s not hugely different from his four-seamer (I’ll go more into this later, but if you combine this year’s two-seamer and four-seamer, it looks an awful lot like all of his fastballs from last year and there’s not much of a speed difference, either). He’s using his fastball a little more and his curve and change a little less, but I’m guessing that might be skewed by his early starts when he was coming off of injury and went pretty fastball heavy.
In short (and again, this is an abbreviated conclusion), I think that McDonald is capable of being very good, but he’s always teetering on the edge of giving up a ton of walks and homers. When he’s even a little bit off, like he was early in this year, things are capable of getting very ugly even though it’s hard to tell what he’s doing differently. The biggest challenge for Ray Searage and his staff is increasing McDonald’s buffer zone so that he’s capable of having starts like Charlie Morton’s last night, where he’s not on his game and he’s still capable of minimizing damage.
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