The Brewers are stumbling at exactly the wrong time, and the Cubs are making the race feel real again.
After Milwaukee dropped its third straight game and got swept by the Padres at Petco Park, manager Pat Murphy gathered his team for a 15-minute meeting and delivered a blunt message:
“Just worry about ourselves and keep rolling and keep fighting, keep playing the way we have. We can't look behind. We have to play the way we play."
Looking behind, though, is getting harder to avoid. Chicago has ripped through this week and trimmed the Brewers’ lead in the National League Central to three games, the closest the Cubs have been to Milwaukee since May 24.
That matters because this race looked all but settled not long ago. As recently as July 24, the Brewers had nearly 90 percent odds to win the division.
Even after Craig Counsell’s Cubs loaded up at the trade deadline, Milwaukee still entered Thursday as the clear favorite. But the numbers have shifted fast: FanGraphs now has the Brewers at 70.2 percent to win the NL Central for a fourth straight year, while Chicago’s chances have climbed past 30 percent.
That may not sound like much on its own, but the schedule gives the Cubs a path. The two teams still meet seven more times before the regular season ends, beginning with a four-game series on Aug.
- Those head-to-head games are likely to decide everything.
For now, Milwaukee still owns the season series, two games to four. But this version of the Cubs is not the same group the Brewers handled earlier in the year. Chicago’s rebuilt pitching staff has become a real weapon, and the combination of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki and Alex Bregman has given the offense a different gear - one capable of stacking crooked numbers and erasing deficits quickly.
The timing only adds to the pressure on Milwaukee. The Brewers are about to face the Dodgers in a four-game weekend set that doubles as an NLCS rematch, and Los Angeles is lined up to start Rōki Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Justin Wrobleski and Tarik Skubal.
Chicago, meanwhile, has its own job to do. The Cubs still need to finish the series in D.C. before heading home for a six-game homestand against the Cardinals and White Sox. But with both teams moving in opposite directions, the door has cracked open a little wider for the Cubs - and for the first time in a while, a division title in a full-length season feels like more than a long shot.
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