May 11, 2007
The Big Stage
The Brewers come to New York:
It's not like they haven't been warned. "I told these kids," Ned Yost said before the charter touched down in New York, "that things are going to start to get a little crazy."
It's not New York, per se, because how many times have the Milwaukee Brewers been there, first to Yankee Stadium as a long-time member of the American League, or even to Shea since '98 as righteous convert to proper way to play the game? You take the No. 7 to Queens, treat it like any other stage and get out, no big deal.
But this time, well, this time it is kind of a big deal, seeing as how the Brewers are in New York as top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one, at least the way Sinatra sung it in homage to the place where you must go hard to make it big.
The sense, then, is that the Brewers are about to be discovered, discovered by the intense scrutiny that comes with playing the Big Apple under such circumstances, discovered by a New York media with the power to decide if and when an entity such as the Brewers is worthy of being declared a big story.
The pitching matchups look like they favor the Brewers as well. It should be a fun weekend in Queens.
The NL Central standings are crazy, man according to mlb.com. Based on run diff, the site figures that Milwaukee "should" only have a two-game lead over Chicago, with Cincy three-and-a-half behind and Houston four out.
Instead the Brewers are romping with a seven-game lead over the second-place Cubs and an eight-game lead over the Astros. The woeful Reds are dead last, nine-and-a-half out.
Of course, some of the luck of the Brewers has really been the skill of the lights-out late-inning relief from Cordero and Turnbow. But my guess is that Milwaukee will start to lose some altitude sooner or later. Which could make things interesting, because the division is tightly bunched except for the Brewers.
