This Week is a Chance for Brewers to Finish Off the Cardinals, as a Thing

Exceptionalism is a funny thing. It can be very real, and very formidable. It's also, almost of necessity, fragile. For 100 years, stretching all the way back to when then-Cardinals executive Branch Rickey essentially invented the farm system as we know it, the St. Louis team has centered its own identity on exceptionalism. Rickey had a knack for that. He first created the Cardinal Way, and then the Dodger Way, and those two organizations rode the crucial innovations Rickey introduced (manipulative and lucrative relationships with minor-league teams; the integration of MLB; and systematized training and player development, in the modern mold) to decades upon decades of genuine, earned exceptionalism.

The Cardinals have persistently outperformed their market size, their payroll, and their projections, almost without interruption, for longer than most baseball fans have been alive. Their dominance of the National League Central has been so complete that even the Brewers winning the division three times in the last six seasons and going to the NLCS more recently than the Cardinals last did has only chipped away at it. The Cards' self-image has been tarnished, slightly, but not erased.

That could change this week. It almost certainly will change, in the months ahead, because the Brewers are cruising toward an easy NL Central title, which will make them the second team (along with the 2016-17 Cubs) to win back-to-back division championships since the last time the Cardinals did it, from 2013-15. After this season, in which the Cardinals will miss the playoffs for the second year in a row and probably finish fourth or fifth in the division, they're likely to fire at least one of manager Oli Marmol and president of baseball operations John Mozeliak. For the first time since they brought in Walt Jocketty in 1994, the team will probably have to admit that they don't have the answers to the riddle of the modern game within their walls and hire someone from outside the franchise.

Still, a decisive series win would be a thunderous way to finish off the dismantling of the franchise's sense of exceptionalism. The Brewers, after all, have been the little brother to the Cardinals, ever since they came to the National League in 1998. The Cardinals have thought of them that way for even longer, going all the way back to the teams' meeting in the 1982 World Series. They do things the same way the Cardinals do, with even more extreme constraints than the Cardinals face, but only recently has the baseball world had to reckon with the emerging reality that the Brewers do those things better. They just do things better than the Cardinals do, and they've done more than close the gap. They've outright surpassed the Cardinals, from the field up to the ownership suite.

This is a low-stakes series. The Brewers don't need to win it, and it will take place in the Cardinals' home. If the Crew do roll in and win in convincing fashion, though, it will become impossible to avoid the truth--and instead of looking dingy, that mirror into which the Cardinals recite their assurances of supremacy will crack outright. Most of the ways that the team has carved out systematic advantages over the years are no longer really available to them. Teams have caught up, and it's hard to run out ahead again--much harder than it was even 30 years ago.

The Cardinals being as good as they were, as consistently as they were, in the ways they managed to do it, was good for baseball. That can be hard to admit, for fans of their fiercest rivals, but it's true. However, that period of the game's history is drawing to a close. The Brewers could shut the storybook with a loud thud, and ensure that the Cardinals' looming winter of reckoning (and the attendant, painful transformation into one of the game's normal, unremarkable, inconsistent teams) comes a couple months sooner than it otherwise might. It's a worthwhile goal, for a team looking to vault past its downtrodden neighbors and tangle with more hale, hearty imperial powers come October.