San Francisco Giants Notes 3/11: Williamson, Morse, Moronta, Crick

The San Francisco Giants were in action twice on Saturday, with a split-squad playing host to the Cincinnati Reds while another group was hosted by the Arizona Diamondbacks. The home team was victorious, but the visiting team wasn’t quite so lucky. Some notes from the pair of games:

Things have shifted quite a bit in the left field battle since the first week of Spring Training. After a tremendous start, mixing power with plate discipline, Jarrett Parker has been very quiet with the bat. Meanwhile, his counterpart, Mac Williamson, has been dialed in at the plate.

Against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Williamson led off the second inning with a frozen-rope double through the gap in left-center field. In the sixth inning, he squared up another ball, but was hit with some bad luck as the rocket went right to the third baseman, Dawel Lugo. Statcast isn’t around to tell us exit velocities just yet, but it’s not hard to imagine both of those balls clearing 100 miles per hour, quite easily, off the bat.

While Parker struggles with his swing (he still has no issues taking a walk), Williamson is getting into a groove and pushing himself to the top of this battle. He needed to have an outstanding spring, considering he has minor league options and Parker doesn’t, and he is doing just that. If Parker doesn’t turn things around fairly quickly, Williamson will give the coaching staff no choice but to ignore the option situation and let the best man for the job play.

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Giants’ prospect Reyes Moronta, a right-handed reliever added to the 40-man roster this past offseason, made his Cactus League debut on Saturday against the Cincinnati Reds, and he was mighty impressive. The stocky hurler (MLB.com has him listed at 6′ and 190 pounds, but that looks to be way off) was perfect in his lone inning of work, and recorded two strikeouts. There weren’t any radar gun readings, unfortunately, but his fastball looked healthy and locked up Chris Okey to catch him looking to end the eighth inning.

Moronta is in big league camp for the first time following a breakout year in 2016, his sixth year in the Giants’ organization. With the Advanced-A San Jose Giants, Moronta made 60 appearances and pitched to a 2.59 ERA and 1.068 WHIP while saving 14 ballgames. He allowed just 43 hits in 59 innings, and struck out an astounding 93 batters, good for 14.2 punchouts per nine innings.

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The temperature is rising in Arizona, and that means baseballs are going to start flying out of parks around the desert. That’s good news for Michael Morse, who hit a pair of home runs on Saturday against the Cincinnati Reds.

The first home run, a second inning solo shot against Scott Feldman, could be considered a Cactus League special. It was a wall-scraper that barely avoided a leaping Billy Hamilton in left-center and snuck over the wall. The second home run, however, was a monster shot over the center field batter’s eye, clearing the fence about 430 feet away from home plate and landing above the huge wall outside the fence.

Morse is fighting for a roster spot as a power-hitting bench guy, but got off to an ice-cold start. He hit his first home run on Wednesday against the Puerto Rican WBC team (that home run doesn’t count towards official stats, for whatever reason), and these two bombs today will certainly help his case a ton.

There is still an uphill battle to earn a job, but Morse is back on track. The extremely popular Giant would definitely be welcomed back with open arms.

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The ship has long sailed on Kyle Crick being the Giants’ top prospect. He was the team’s number-one prospect just a few years ago, and was featured on multiple top-100 lists, but isn’t even featured as one of the Giants’ 30 best prospects prior to this season. But as Hank Schulman wrote earlier this spring, the Giants aren’t yet giving up on the still just 24-year-old hurler.

Team brass is still giving Crick his chances this spring, and for the most part, he has been pitching very well. The right-hander has made four appearances, pitching 4.2 shutout innings and allowing just three hits and two walks while striking out four. His outing Saturday against Arizona was his best this spring, as he pitched a clean seventh inning with a strikeout and two weak groundball outs.

Crick’s command hasn’t been perfect, as he is still getting into more two-ball and three-ball counts than would be desired, but it’s promising that he isn’t losing the hitters as much. Obviously this is an extremely small sample size, but if Crick can get the walks down to a more manageable rate, he can still be an asset to the Giants in some way. A walk-rate of four per nine innings (about where it is so far through spring) would be much more tolerable than the 6.1 he allowed in 2014, 9.4 in 2015, or 5.5 in 2016.

Next: Giants Notes: Lefty Relievers, Calixte

Crick is still a work in progress, but his arm is still electric. He’s not at the age where he’s beyond salvaging, but time waits for no one. This is a make or break year for Crick.