Orcs , more important than we think?

[Diamond18]

If either Sauron's or Saruman's orcs had succeeded in getting Merry and Pippin to their respective masters, the two poor Hobbits, not having the Ring, would probably have been tortured for information and then killed.

And then wouldn't Gandalf have felt bad about calling Pippin names!

Of course, it is a rather moot point, because why would Tolkien have written it that way? In a book like LotR, with all the interweaving subplots, if you change one thing, the rest doesn't work out the same. That's a nice thing about his stories: everything matters.