The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
MacDonald has overseen great success as pitching coach
It was a particularly hot, mid-June day some 20 years ago. Father’s Day.
Dave MacDonald had just finished breakfast and was ready to bring his son, Josh, to his Babe Ruth baseball game. MacDonald got up for a cup of coffee and fell over in the kitchen of his brother-inlaw’s humid apartment in Shelton. Josh, his uncle and cousin figured it was probably heat stroke. Someone called 9-1-1, and MacDonald was taken to the hospital.
Less than a half hour later, Dave MacDonald was dead of a heart attack. At 46. On Father’s Day.
Josh had just turned 15 at the time, just finished his freshman year at Notre DameWest Haven. Now, his single mom, Regina, was going to have a difficult time paying for his tuition. But she soon got a phone call from the school’s president, Brother James Branigan, who assured her that the school would make it affordable for the family.
“I probably wasn’t the kid they were happiest about, either,” MacDonald recalled, with a chuckle. “I was getting detention all the time, being a wise-ass.”
But over the next three years, he matured.
“Anybody that’s gone to Notre Dame, they understand the school is really a lot more than just the education,” he said. “It’s a life-changing event, in my mind. I was this punkish middle school kid that needed discipline in his life, needed that extra attention that Notre Dame provided. It gave me a ton of positive role models.”
On the baseball field, the Milford native helped pitch a Notre Dame team filled with more than a half-dozen future Division 1 players to the Class LL state title in 2000, and was the All-Area MVP in 2001. He went on to pitch at UConn for four seasons, and is now in his eighth season as the Huskies’ pitching coach.
MacDonald has overseen an unprecedented run of success by Husky hurlers. UConn’s staff has posted three of its four best team ERAs since 1980 under MacDonald’s watch, and eclipsed 500 strikeouts as a staff the past three seasons. UConn has had 11 pitchers signed by major league clubs since MacDonald’s arrival, including a first-round pick (Anthony Kay in 2016) and a secondrounder (Tim Cate in 2018), and could have another high draft pick this June in junior lefty Mason Freole.
MacDonald brushes away most of the credit. Interestingly, he takes more of a paternal pride in his pitchers’ success.
“You get so proud, especially when they reach heights that maybe they didn’t see. I think Tim Cate knew that he was gonna be pretty good, and Anthony Kay was gonna be pretty good. But there’s other guys that reached levels they weren’t sure they could get to. So, if I had any part of that along the way, that’s unbelievable.”
“I’ve been blessed in every way,” MacDonald added. “I’ve had great pitchers and great people to be around every single day. Some of them have been able to do great things while they’ve been here, that I’ve been able to observe.”
UConn head coach Jim Penders knows the somewhat hyperactive kid he recruited out of high school, with his “Mad Hungarian” mound routine, multiple arm angles and penchant for buzzing a batter every now and then, deserves “a ton of credit” for the team’s recent success.
“Any statistic you want to look at since Josh has been pitching coach seems to get better and better,” Penders noted. “We’ve had some very good personnel, but he’s made them that way.”
Penders, in his 16th season at the Huskies’ helm, remembered Wills Montgomerie as a struggling freshman who “might have led the country in balks.” He left the program two years later a sixth-round pick by the Dodgers.
“He coaches with his heart,” Penders said of MacDonald. “He’s not a big mechanics guy ... he’s not a gadgets guy. But he’s a believer that pitching has a lot to do with what’s inside your rib cage and what’s between your ears.”
NO REGRETS
MacDonald may no longer be the “wise-ass” who knew the detention room all too well at Notre Dame-West Haven, or even the cocky kid who thought he should have been drafted higher than the 47th round out of high school in 2001. But he’s still a character of the game. With his booming voice and gregarious personality, you always know when Josh MacDonald is in the room.
“As goofy as he can be,” Penders noted, “he was so serious when he competed, and he’s still very serious when he competes — whether it be pick-up hoops or calling pitches.”
So it’s little surprise that his general advice to pitchers is: “Let’s just attack. Let’s attack this practice, this batter. Let’s just be in that mode of always trying to attack that portion of our game. In the end, they’re on the winning side of it more often than not.”
While recruiting MacDonald long ago, Penders (still an assistant at the time) remembered watching the big hurler throw a complete game at Palmer Field in the American Legion state tournament on a Sunday, close out a game on Monday, then start again against a rival on Thursday.
“You can’t do this,” Penders told him. “You’re gonna completely screw up your arm.”
“Coach, I have to do it,” MacDonald responded. “My teammates are counting on me. I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna win.”
He did, but he also wound up paying for it. MacDonald pitched that entire summer, as well as the ensuing fall at UConn, with no ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. He underwent Tommy John surgery after his freshman season.
“That tells you a little about his will, his tolerance for pain, how tough he is, and what he expects from his own pitchers,” said Penders. “He expects them to be mentally tough and physically tough. He’s absolutely of that ilk.”
MacDonald would pitch in 62 games over his UConn career. He earned Penders his first win as head coach in 2004, and wound up going 10-8 with a 4.85 ERA as a reliever and a starter.
“I did everything,” he recalled. “I don’t know if I did anything well, but I did enough OK.”
He spent three years as a grad assistant at LIU, coached in Cape Cod for a couple of summers and was head coach at St. Thomas More in 2012 when he took “about 22 seconds” to accept Penders’ invitation to replace Justin Blood as UConn’s pitching coach.
And as he oversaw a throwing session for Feole, his latest UConn pitching phenom, on a recent afternoon, the “punkish” kid who watched his dad die right in front of him on Father’s Day some 20 years ago, who’s had ups and downs in his life and career, realized there was nowhere else he’d rather be.
“I don’t regret anything,” Josh MacDonald said. “I think I ended up on my feet pretty well.”