With their backs against the wall at the end of July, the Milwaukee Brewers were, more or less, dead in the water.
Management traded away ace pitcher Zack Grienke. The Brewers front office scrambled to get any value that it could, opting for a youth movement in the rotation and focusing its sights on 2013 and the future beyond.
That, however, was before the Brewers finished with their best month of the season, won 13 of 16 games and propelled themselves back into what seemed like a legitimate shot at a wild-card spot. The team went 16-12 in August — its best record in any month of the season — and started September with a 4-1 record, prior to Thursday's game. The offense, by all accounts, appeared to be unstoppable, averaging almost seven runs per game in that 16-game span. And the young pitchers were good enough to actually prompt a question that no one thought they would hear at the end of July when Greinke packed his bags and left for the West Coast:
Could the Brewers actually make the playoffs?
The players started to believe. The coaches started to believe. And sure, they'll say they believed all along, but after this recent run, something changed in Milwaukee's clubhouse. This much was certain.
But after the team's split series in Miami, which ended Thursday with a 6-2 loss that was rarely ever in question, it's tough to look at the standings and the Brewers' upcoming schedule and believe. There's no taking away what Milwaukee has done in the past month — it's been remarkable. But to believe the Brewers are anything but too little, too late may be an exercise in futility at this point.
After Thursday afternoon's game, Milwaukee is seven games out of the National League wild-card hunt — a number that doesn't seem all that impossible to reach. But with five teams in front of them, the 2012 Brewers don't look poised to make a 2011 Cardinals-like run into the playoffs.
While impressive, the Brewers' recent string of success included just two series against a single team above .500 — the Pirates, who had been mired in an awful skid— and a whole lot of lineups that only a mother could love. The Brewers' next three weeks will include five teams in the NL playoff race, including two division leaders and the best team in baseball. By the time Milwaukee plays another stinker like the Marlins, its wild-card hopes will already be decided.
Last year's Cardinals have given down-and-out wild-card contenders plenty of hope for miraculous comebacks. But make no mistake, this year's Brewers are not last year's Cardinals. As Brewers manager Ron Roenicke said last week, Cardinals management was adding players at the deadline last year, not subtracting. St. Louis always thought it would make it back. For Milwaukee, that optimism only just started to take hold.
Let's be clear: This isn't a definitive statement that the Brewers are out of the NL wild-card race. Crazier things have happened. But the Brewers' series against Miami didn't do them any favors. A sweep could've brought them as close as five games away. Now, with seven games between them and the Cardinals, the Brewers need a sweep in St. Louis against their biggest rivals. Anything less will doom them to a quiet October.
That series will start Friday with Brewers' No. 1 pitcher Yovani Gallardo taking the mound against a team that has historically pounded him. The Brewers' hopes will rely on his turning around that trend, and the rest of his rotation-mates following his lead.
Even a sweep would leave the Brewers with an even tougher team — the Atlanta Braves — that they'd need to win at least two of three against and likely sweep. But for now, it's the Cardinals series that will decide Milwaukee's fate, one way or the other.
There's no reason not to be proud of what the Brewers have done in the last two months. They've beaten the odds. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. But sometimes, that's just not enough.
And without their best baseball in the next week or two or three, the best of this year's Milwaukee Brewers may have just come too little, too late.
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