Time to Start Rolling the Rock Up the Mountain Again

Tuesday isn't the first time the Brewers have woken up looking up at first place in the division since their Craigtember in April promotion. This time, though, it has a much greater sense of gravity and danger to it. The Pirates, who had briefly eclipsed them a couple other times this spring, are in freefall. The Cubs remain a few games back, stumbling in their own ways. The Reds, though, seem to be just hitting their stride, while the Crew are floundering.

When the class of the National League for 2023 came to Miller Park Monday night, it was a chance to prove that the Brewers should be primarily identified as a first-place team, rather than as one who has been outscored on the season and can't hit its way around even the slightest misstep by its pitching staff. Instead, before the first out was recorded by Corbin Burnes, the rout was on. The Diamondbacks looked around, figured one turn-of-the-century retractable-roofed rectangle was as good as another, and made Milwaukee their home field for the night. 

It's true that the Brewers are getting healthy, now. They won't get Mitchell back at all in 2023, and Woodruff seems to be a month or more away, but the rest of the guys who were felled by injury as the team faded from its hot start--Urias, Jesse Winker, Wade Miley, Willy Adames, and Eric Lauer--are back, in various forms. It's just not nearly enough to make a difference. The team isn't in a death spiral, but their unproductive fishtailing continues. On a given night, everything depends on what their starting pitcher has, because they're hardly ever going to bowl an opponent over with their bats, and their defense is no longer the very best in baseball. 

On Monday, Corbin Burnes couldn't figure out how to finish off any of the Diamondbacks. He only induced six whiffs in an 86-pitch outing, and Arizona relentlessly chipped away at him. That's not all his fault. No team in baseball makes contact at a higher rate than Torey Lovullo's this year. They're the 2023 version of last year's Cleveland Guardians, only they have better power and (therefore) are even more dangerous. Still, Burnes was coming off an impressive and important start against the Orioles, in which he looked as though he was poised to turn a corner and become the workhorse with the sub-3.00 ERA that Brewers fans were able to enjoy for the last three years. Instead, faced with the inability to miss bats, he imploded, like a disguised cyborg on an old cartoon when confronted with a simple riddle.

As much as the offense should be castigated for its utter unresponsiveness against the unimposing Merrill Kelly, it would be wrong to drop the blame for Monday night on them. Burnes left the team with no realistic chance to win before they were even able to Velcro their batting gloves. Then again, it's the inefficiency of the offense that helps make situations like the first inning snowball. Burnes tried to be too fine, knowing that even allowing two or three runs in the first frame was as likely to prove fatal to the team as the six Arizona eventually scored against him.

That 14-5 start happened to a different team. This one bears little resemblance to it. That doesn't mean there aren't good things happening. Christian Yelich has been better during the team's bout of turbulence than he was during their halcyon start. William Contreras keeps hitting, however flawed his profile might be. Despite significant turnover, the bullpen has been what the team hoped it would be. Still, the 14-5 version of the Brewers--with optimism bubbling around Brice Turang, plenty of production from Willy Adames and Rowdy Tellez, and a hot start by Brian Anderson--was more complete than this one. 

Whatever advantage that start gave them remains, in some sense, because without it, they might be in as rough a shape as the Cubs, or even the Cardinals. It feels irrelevant now, though. They're back to Square One. Winning this year's NL Central will not merely be a slog through the mud. It might also be a Sisyphean rolling of a stone uphill. Every now and then, because they're broken and star-crossed and because the rest of the division is good enough to at least stay close, the Brewers are going to find that they've fallen right back to their starting point--that their progress has been erased, and have to get the stone moving again from the bottom of the hill.

Inarguably, the Central is a messy, undignified race this year. Changes to the schedule have made the division look even weaker than it really is. The Cardinals' collapse has created a power vacuum, and no team has yet been equal to the task of filling it. The Brewers are still the best-equipped team to do that. It's just that they no longer have even the vestigial head start they'd enjoyed over the last few weeks.