A five-game winning streak unprecedented in this Pirates season did not come wrapped in ribbons and rainbows, exactly. Unpack it and you'll find that each victory required an ocean of sweat and a mountain of nerve.
The scores were 4-3, 4-2, 4-3, 3-2 (in 10 innings), and 4-2, and while that muddy and frayed string stretching back to Sunday did very little to clarify the matter of who'll eventually prevail in the summer-long slog they call the National League Central Division, the Pirates at least made it clear who won't win it _ the Milwaukee Brewers.
The Brewers came to town Monday in first place and left for Philadelphia Thursday night still in first place, and first place has been their Central address for 61 days, but their time atop these shaggy standings is dwindling, it says here.
Shadowed by the suddenly awakened Chicago Cubs and swept by the suddenly competent Pirates, who finally put together the kind of homestand (6-1) of which winning teams make a habit, the Brewers exposed their essential profile this week on the North Shore. It's true that on a lot of nights the Brewers resemble the wall-banging Crew of Milwaukee heritage because they lead the league in homers, but this week they looked more like their image in the funhouse mirror _ a bunch of guys who often can't hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle.
Craig Counsell's team struck out 10 times Thursday after striking out 15 times Wednesday night after striking out 11 times Tuesday night after striking out 10 times Monday night, but here is what's really striking _ 950 Brewers strikeouts in the season's first 98 games.
Nine-hundred and fifty strikeouts? Well, that leads the universe, and nobody is close. Only two other big league teams even have 900.
How many strikeouts, even in an industry awash in shameless K totals, are too many?
"It depends on what goes with that," said Counsell after his club dropped its fifth straight and sixth in the past nine. "You can't just isolate the strikeouts, I don't think. Something has to go with it. I mean if there's a lot of walks that go with it, if there's homeruns that go with it, you can produce offense. But when you get into low-scoring games and you're not hitting home runs, certainly the strikeouts get magnified.
"We're playin' good baseball; we just played a tough baseball series. We got outscored by six runs in the series and lost four games."
I'm not saying the Brewers won't right themselves in this 10-game road trip that starts a stretch when they play 14 of 17 away from Miller Park, but it sure looks like they're going to strike out as a team even more than they did a year ago, when they led the universe with 1,543 at-bats that taxed opposing defense at a rate of zero percent. They're on pace to strike out 1,570 times, a total no team that won this division has even come within 200 of in the past 10 years.
The Brewers need a torrent of long balls to overcome that rate of whiffing, but in the pivotal four-game series that ended here Thursday, the Pirates out-homered the Crew three jacks to two. Now you look up and it is the Pirates, not the Brewers, who have the best record in the NL Central since May 13, 34-26. The Brewers, now 3-8 against Pittsburgh, have fallen to 20-21 against divisional opponents. The Pirates have bubbled up to 20-19.
"The dynamic has changed a little bit," said the Pirates' Josh Harrison, whose RBI single in the fifth put the Pirates ahead to stay, whose sensational diving stab at third saved a Milwaukee run an inning later. "I wouldn't say I feel any differently overall, but I think after the All-Star break we knew what was ahead of us. We knew, you know, just keep playin' and keep grindin'. We've got some young guys that I've mentioned (Josh Bell, Adam Frazier, Max Moroff) that are growing up right before us.
"This will be a good test for them in the second half, because they've been stepping up."
The Brewers, it appears, are stepping aside. They asked us to believe it was they who'd take a mediocre division hostage in 2017, but everyone suspected it was a mirage. When they finally recede from relevance this summer, they'll get a short two-word epitaph: Strike three.
