No one is happier to leave the Pacific Coast League than young SF Giants pitcher

On Sunday, Trevor McDonald allowed just one earned run in six innings in a 3-1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers. The 2025 season has been a mixed bag for the SF Giants rookie pitcher, but no pitcher is arguably happier to leave the Pacific Coast League (PCL) than McDonald.

No one is happier to leave the Pacific Coast League than young SF Giants pitcher

The PCL is a very hitter-friendly environment. Many of the ballparks are at higher elevations, so breaking pitches are not quite as sharp, and the ball tends to carry more. This leads to some inflated offensive numbers.

For example, the league OPS in the PCL was .803 in 2025. If you take that number and paste it into the Giants' lineup, it would immediately become the highest OPS in the Giants lineup.

Incredibly, Rafael Devers leads the way with a .780 OPS this season for the Giants among all hitters. The incredible part is that not one Giants hitter is above that mark. Every season, there is usually an outlier performance by a player, or a hitter who has a brief stint with the club, but has like two hits in three at-bats.

The PCL is a great environment for hitters, but a brutal one for pitchers. Even at sea level, the ballparks heavily favor the hitters. This is true for Sutter Health Park, which is where the Sacramento River Cats and Athletics play their home games. That ballpark has a 109 Park Factor, which is second in baseball, behind only Coors Field.

In watching Trveor McDonald this season with the River Cats, nothing necessarily jumped off the page. He had a 5.31 ERA in 29 outings for the River Cats. The strikeout rate (9.1 K/9) was not all that high, and the walk rate (3.9 BB/9) was a bit too high for someone with low strikeout numbers.

McDonald flashes a low-90's, bowling-ball sinker that gets hit into the ground a lot. He had a 53.3 percent ground ball rate, so he did a nice job of keeping the ball on the ground this season.

The 24-year-old pitcher mixes in a low 80's curveball and a mid-80's changeup, but he relies primarily on his sinker-curveball combination. To stick as a starter, he may need to mix in a third pitch to keep hitters honest.

The curveball can be an above-average pitch, and he showed that on Sunday. He got 18 swings on the curveball, including seven whiffs.

What always felt a little unfortunate about McDonald's numbers this year is that when he allowed the hitter to get the ball in the air, it left the ballpark at a high rate. I was not imagining that, either. McDonald had a 21.2 percent HR/FB rate, which was the second-highest mark among all qualified minor league pitchers.

For reference, the league average HR/FB rate is 11.8 percent in the majors this season. This is where a metric like xFIP might be useful because it tends to assume that pitchers have more control on the number of fly balls they allow, rather than how many of those leave the ballpark.

McDonald put up a 4.87 xFIP with Sacramento this season, so that is a slight improvement over his ERA. Perhaps, a better barometer of how he pitched this season. Regardless, he is likely happy to be out of the PCL for now.

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