MILWAUKEE — ‘‘Tell them you got in a Lyft and the driver said the Mets suck!’’
That’s what greeted me when I touched down last Monday in New York.
During the course of the next four days, it turned out my hilarious, all-around stereotypical New Yorker of a Lyft driver — shoutout to Larry — was right.
The Cubs dealt the Mets a four-game sweep that sparked team brass to fire manager Carlos Mendoza.
Even as an avalanche of pitching injuries threatened to bury them — and still might — the Cubs looked all sorts of back in New York, scoring 33 runs in four games.
That offensive funk? No more. Instead, the offense was grooving. It was just plain funky.
And then? The Brewers.
‘‘The Brewers are the cream of the crop,’’ starting pitcher Matthew Boyd said Sunday. ‘‘They’ve won the division three years in a row and multiple years before that.
‘‘The [National League] Central runs through them. We all know that.’’
The Cubs pulled a rabbit-sized 4-3 victory out of their hats Sunday, scoring three runs in the 10th inning and narrowly avoiding disaster in the bottom of the inning, all despite getting only four hits on the afternoon.
It sent the Cubs, who took the series by winning two out of three, back down I-94 feeling a lot better than they did after the NL Division Series last October.
But if the Brewers showed one thing, even in a series loss, it’s that they’re no Mets.
The supposed soft spot in the Cubs’ schedule is over, with 21 consecutive games against teams that started June below .500 now in the rearview mirror. They didn’t start that stretch so hot, but they emerged from an offensive malaise by the end.
Just in time for their pitching staff to go on the fritz.
It’s not so much poor performance as bad injury luck. Make that terrible injury luck. There’s an entire rotation and late-inning group on the injured list at the same time.
So while from the outside this looked like a key series against the division leaders as the Cubs try to get back toward the top of the Central — they’re now 5½ games out — it ended up being a test in survival for a team patching its pitching together.
Fittingly for being in Wisconsin, the Cubs have bigger fish to fry than the Brewers at the moment.
‘‘Really, I’m thinking about our team right now,’’ manager Craig Counsell said after the Cubs’ victory Saturday. ‘‘We’ve just gone through this period of pitcher loss, right? We’ve got to get through this phase, that’s No. 1. . . . The focus of everything for me right now is, let’s get our team through this phase and come out the other side with some semblance of order in how we’re going to run it the rest of the year.
‘‘We need health, and we’ve got new guys . . . doing new things. What my focus is on right now is getting that to a good place.’’
The Cubs are facing big challenges that have nothing to do with the Brewers. Somehow, however, amid all the injuries and rainouts and everything else, the Cubs went 6-1 on the road trip.
They woke up Sunday in the second NL wild-card spot. But with Cade Horton, Justin Steele, Ben Brown, Jameson Taillon, Edward Cabrera, Daniel Palencia, Phil Maton and Hoby Milner sidelined for now — and, in some cases, deep into the summer and beyond — the task is staying afloat long enough to give president Jed Hoyer and the front office something to do at the trade deadline.
The bats coming to life and contributions up and down the roster, the themes of this successful trip — and of successful baseball, in general — will help with that.
But even if the Cubs escape death-by-pitching-injuries and find themselves a contender in September, that Brewers problem doesn’t figure to go away.
The Central, as they know, goes through Milwaukee.