I don't think there's a lot of stakes in this, because I do think the team has played to its limit over this first set of games, but tonight's game seems to loom fairly large in terms of continuing to play decent baseball. We'll see if Thompson can keep things rolling in the right direction, as this matchup seems to be the only one that might favor us in the series. Lauer can be pretty decent, but he's much preferable to Burnes vs. Brubaker tomorrow or Woodruff vs. Keller on Wednesday.
In fact, I'm not sure it's totally crazy to assume that the season series vs. the Brewers might itself loom largest for the overall prognosis. They are clearly the better team, but they've started off slow, with their pitchers not being overwhelmingly dominant and the offense again being streaky. We'll face them six times in the next week and a half, and with the pitching matchups, that might be the groundwork for them to get back on track in the division and for us to sink into the hole everyone expects us to.
If we can hold our own on this road trip and get back to PNC next week in about the same position, then it's not hard to imagine us continuing to flirt with .500 for a little while. As we move forward, I do think it's going to be important for a few pitchers to at least be able to throw 5, because even with multiple bullpen guys who can go multiple innings, there's not going to be enough depth once the rosters shrink.
Brubaker and Keller are the two obvious red flags here, as there are serious reasons to doubt both going forward, but they do at least have the capability to hold their own. I think our ability to tread water probably depends in large part on Keller putting things together. The offense looks like it's capable of clawing some runs out relatively often, but the whole package still very much seems like something where the bottom can fall out on the team really quick, resulting in the 2-8 runs that this team will find it hard to recover from.
If we can get a couple of starters stepping up each time through the rotation, then there aren't really a lot of threatening stretches in the schedule until June, when we have 11 games in 11 days vs. the Braves, Cardinals, and Giants, with 8 of those games on the road (and 4 in Atlanta, which is one of our biggest house of horrors).
All told, my main hope for tonight is that Shelton doesn't f*** around with Castillo. He should be in the lineup vs. a lefty, especially since there are two dominant righties in the next two days. I could see him again excessively tweaking, and then Castillo gets rotated back in on Wednesday vs. Woodruff or whatever. Let him try to stay in a groove, and more importantly, keep his bat in there vs. the lefty to try and help us steal game one. This is what I hope we see tonight:
3B Hayes
CF Reynolds
1B/DH Chavis
DH/1B Yoshi/Vogel (I lean towards Yoshi but maybe Vogey makes more sense since he should know the Brewers)
2B Castillo
RF Gamel
C Perez
LF Marisnik
SS Newman
