A few points . . .
Winn has never played 162 games in a season. He’s incredibly young because he rose so fast through the ranks so he doesn’t even have much in the way of longer minor league seasons under his belt. That’s why the team signed Crawford. Crawford was an all-star not that long ago and still is a solid SS defender. He was signed to play about 1 day a week. It’s on Crawford that he can’t seem to hit. Not on Ollie. Ollie is trying to keep Winn fresh and ready for an entire season. That’s his job.
I don’t know why Mikolas was gassed in the 5th. It doesn’t seem like he should have been other than he was suffering through a long inning. Maybe it was the change in temperatures going to AZ? But that’s on him. He needs to have the stamina to be able to get through that inning and he obviously was suffering. So they went to Pallante. Pallante gets groundballs more than 70% of the time. It’s a rate that is uncanny – unheard of in almost the entire MLB history. And . . . he got a 2 hopper infield groundball. It was hit fairly hard and it just barely eluded Gorman at 2B. If Gorman gets about 2 more inches over, that goes for an out and the damage is limited and suddenly we are saying Pallante did a good job. The reality is he did neither a good or a bad job. He just did what he does. He got a groundball and we couldn’t get it. We can’t always go to Romero or his arm will fall off soon. And besides, he may have also ended up giving up a hit that eluded a fielder by a couple inches. This is baseball. It happens all the time. I’d have preferred Liberatore, but apparently he was sick. So you do the best with who you have while considering that you have to get through 162 games.
I don’t know what to say about the offense. It’s been ugly after ugly. Yesterday they did have some hits and hit some other balls hard that got robbed. I guess that’s promising. But Scott has been a near automatic out and Siani would likely be no different given his history. You always expect there to be someone at any given time who just isn’t hitting well. That happens. But right now, it’s a whole bunch of some bodies. I’m not sure putting Noot in CF is going to solve all of those issues. It might help. Or he might quickly hurt his ribs again diving for a ball. Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that stupid collision between Carlson and Walker in the 2nd to final Spring Training game has really had a powerful impact.