Funny, but when I pointed out last year that the Brewers hot April was padded by a lot of games against the Reds, Pirates, and Cubs I was dismissed as a pessimist. The Brewers proceeded to play .500 ball the rest of the season.
I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the Cubs and Pirates as potential contenders to win the division. If the Cardinals don’t straighten out like they seem to every year, and the Brewers can’t stabilize their pitching situation, we could be looking at a division race that could be won with 85 wins or less, and it wouldn’t take that much for those teams to achieve that.
As a previous poster pointed out, it isn’t unusual for baseball teams to have a significant year over year improvement that nobody predicted before the season started. The Brewers have done it a few times, in 1978, 2007, and 2017. The Royals in 2015 went from years of futility to the World Series.
As the Brewers have shown in this homestand, beating teams that a team “should” beat doesn’t always happen. So, I wouldn’t scoff at the Pirates beating up on the Reds (who just swept the Rangers) and Rockies, or the Cubs for winning something like 10 of 13 recently.