Give the Brewers credit. (Probably, you were already, but give them even more.) Four games into a six-game road trip designed to destroy them, they're 4-0. They hung on to win a preposterous 15-14 decision against the Athletics in Las Vegas Monday night, with two runs in the seventh inning, one in the eighth, two in the ninth, four in the 10th and one in the 12th. Somehow, they got one day closer to their fourth straight division title. They specialize in this. When there's adversity at hand, they ratchet their game up just enough to meet and overcome it. They're ahead of schedule, yet again.

However, even after just one game in the Nevada desert, it's clear that the schedule-makers did the team dirty here. Earlier this season, many Brewers fans lamented the surfeit of early off days in the team's schedule, which will lead to a dense schedule and little rest in the second half. That was partially by the Brewers' own design, though. They get input into the structure of their schedule; every team does.

It seems safe to say, however, that the team didn't sign up for this trip. Nor does the league appear to have properly thought it through. After three games at the pitcher-shredding mountainside pasture of Coors Field, the Brewers had to fly right to Vegas to play in what turns out to be an equally destructive environment, or nearly so. Vegas is nowhere near the elevation of Denver, but the heat (Monday's contest had an official game-time temperature of 87°, despite starting at 7:05 local time) makes up for the loss of altitude. The Brewers were outhomered 7 to 4. Four balls were hit at least 440 feet.

Brewers hurlers struck out 20 A's batters, but it still took seven arms to limp to the finish line. The Gravitron (Kyle Harrison) crashed, thanks to the disruption of gravity itself: his fastball had 3 inches less induced vertical break than his season average. The same was true for A's starter Jeffrey Springs, and for the four-seamers of Grant Anderson and Chad Patrick. Las Vegas isn't just a tough place to pitch. Until the team can finish building a stadium that mitigates some of the environmental effects better, it's a second Coors. 

The A's don't normally play there, of course. This is something akin to exhibition baseball, but the only way to get a big-league team to agree to play against the eventual Vegas residents there was to make the contests count. Putting a trip to this version of Vegas right behind a weekend at Coors, however, was a mistake by the league for which the Brewers will pay a heavy price. 

At a glance, the team's bullpen picture doesn't look that bad, save for the hit it took Monday:

Remember, though, that this is not the team's 'A' bullpen—not by a long shot. They've suffered a series of injuries this year, and a cluster of them recently. They've swapped out multiple tired arms for fresh ones. Now, they're a little bit roster-locked, trying to get by with the group on hand, and they only have two truly fresh arms going into Tuesday night. One of those is Megill, who hasn't pitched since Friday. Either the team is hiding something that's nagging him, or—and this is more likely—Pat Murphy correctly saw what was happening to pitchers' fastball shapes Monday night and realized Megill would be a poor candidate to pitch well in Vegas. There are two games left in the series, though. Will Megill simply sit them out?

Coors Field rips pitching staffs apart for as much as a week after a tough visit, and though they swept the Rockies, the Brewers had a tough visit, indeed. Now, they have to try to survive what looks to be a second straight series under nigh-impossible conditions in which to pitch well. This is all also happening just as the average drag on the ball drops precipitously, league-wide. Lately, the ball has gotten a whole lot more lively, and whether it was intentional or not, the league sent a team on a road trip into Coors and Coors Light to throw balls that are much readier to fly out of the park, anyway.

Yes, the Rockies just have to live this way. They also get the benefit of acclimation, though, and can build (though rarely have built) a roster with their home park and its quiddities in mind. The Brewers have no such recourse. They'll still get through this, as their record to start the trip proves. They'll win the division again, and they might play deeper into October this time. They're a very good team. But this was very bad scheduling, and the league made one of its best teams do some needless gymnastics this week. It's not over, either. More roster moves resulting directly from this brutal week lie ahead.