Pirates James McDonald Concerns/Doesn’t Concern/Concerns Clint Hurdle

James McDonald doesn’t instill confidence in me.  After getting five outs against the St. Louis Cardinals and putting his team in a serious hole, the Bucs refused to roll over.  The Pirates’ offense out hit the Cardinals, but couldn’t excel when they had repeated opportunities with runners on base.  The Pirate defense couldn’t play well enough.

But to get back to the elephant in the  room blog post – James McDonald makes me very uncomfortable… almost like that sketchy bar near your house that you only go in when you really need a six-pack.

Clint Hurdle didn’t sound real comforted by the fact that Justin Wilson and Bryan Morris, who threw 45 pitches, had to save the day.  The Bucco bullpen has done serious work over the past few days.

The Pirates skipper was complimentary (calling the work Wilson and Morris did outstanding) about the work that the young Bucs arms did to connect the dots.

On McDonald? Well,  Hurdle didn’t sound too clear on the answer for JMac.  Hurdle started his post-game interview with this comment:

"There wasn’t anything real crisp."

As Hurdle stared at his post-game statistics as he started to answer a question about McDonald’s velocity, he didn’t look anywhere specific as he said:

"I don’t want to speculate right now. I haven’t had any conversations with him. So I’m probably not going to have any answers for you along those lines tonight. I need to sit down and really talk to the guy. We chatted briefly. Haven’t seen anything glaring, but we saw what you saw as far as velocity, finish, the command. There were some challenges out there for him tonight."

Hurdle’s Pirates fell to 6-7, and he commented that the Cardinals had to bring in their closer and the team had the tying run waiting to go on deck.  Or something like that.

It didn’t take long for the topic to return to James McDonald, but Hurdle was dissmissive:

"I’m not going to worry about it."

…and then, a few quotes later, Hurdle realized that McDonald is a big part of this 2013 season and backtracked on his earlier comment:

"We’ve got to find out where James McDonald is at."

Yeah, send the search party.

Remember that slider?