Rollins Believes Phils’ Offense Will Not Take Backseat To Their Pitching

Jimmy Rollins spoke to members of the local media yesterday and made some strong statements about the upcoming season which turned some heads.  Rollins expects the team’s bats to rebound from what was an off

“That’s fine,” Rollins said when he was told the about the thinking by many that the Phillies’ offense is now the weaker link. “I guess people can look at it that way when you go from scoring 900 runs one season to 850 the next. That’s a big drop.

If for no other reason media members and fans feel like the absence of Jayson Werth behind Ryan Howard will leave the big man unprotected and therefore weaken the lineup.  Rollins was buying it.

“It’s definitely hard to replace a guy like Jayson, but I have confidence in Domonic [Brown] and Ben [Francisco],” Rollins said. “It’s more than likely that they will be in a platoon situation. They are in the same sort of situation Jayson was in when he first came over here. I still think we have a great lineup. We won more games last year than we ever have before and you don’t just do that with pitching.”

Rollins believes that Brown will figure things out despite struggling during winter ball.

“We spoke a lot last year,” the shortstop said. “He reminds me a lot of myself in that he likes to sit back and observe. He knows a lot more than he’s willing to let on, and he works really hard. Because he works so hard, he is able to get on the field and make things look easy.”

We’ll see how it turns out, but if Jimmy is right and the offense has a bounce back year, the Phillies could win a 100 plus games with no problem, but that also means everybody staying healthy and you can never take that for granted.