Before his outing today, I was going to write a positive post about McDonald's first five innings of the spring. Basically, you can't worry too much about pitchers giving up runs in first. As I have written before, the pitchers are out there just trying to work on the pitches they need to work on among some other things.
A big thin that pitchers want to get under wraps in spring is their location, and McDonald had been doing a good job of that before today. In his first five innings, McDonald walked just one batter. That was an issue for J-Mac last year; when he would get beat up it was most often because of walks. Today he walked two batters in three innings and really just didn't have control of the fastball. When he threw it for strikes, it seemed to be right in the hitting zone, and the Orioles took advantage.
I'm not worried about the home runs or the hits he gave up today, just because it's spring training. However, if McDonald starts losing control and walking a lot of guys, I am going to be a bit worried. We'll see how he bounces back in his next outing.
The game is still going on, there will be a recap up here when it's over.