Not even two weeks ago, the Cubs completed their second 10-game winning streak of the season.
How wickedly good must a team be to roll 10s twice in such a short stretch of the season? Best-in-baseball good, the Cubs’ 27-12 record at roughly the quarter mark said.
But four straight series losses and a 2-9 record since then have sent the Wile E. Coyote Cubs smashing face-first into a painting of a tunnel on a cliffside wall. And dropping an anvil on their head this week at Wrigley Field was — who else? — the ever-clever, always-one-step-ahead Brewers, who didn’t miss a chance to embarrass their rivals with a three-game sweep and, more importantly, are back in first place by 1½ games in the National League Central.
Only the Cubs’ yearly tormentors would be so brazen and mischievous as to speed into town amid their hottest stretch of the season and give the Cubs’ early division lead — not to mention the Cubs’ whole early-season winning vibe — the box-of-TNT treatment.
Some things never change.
“I’m not surprised by this at all,” longtime left fielder Christian Yelich told the Sun-Times before the finale. “Regardless of what’s said from the outside or how we may be perceived — good or bad — by other people, our expectation is still to win.”
To be clear, Yelich was talking about the division.
Yes, the same division the Cubs were favored to win — again — and still are, in fact.
Yes, the same division the Brewers have won back-to-back-to-back, leaving the Cubs in the dust while utterly blowing past any and all win-total projections from leading analytics nerds for the small-market powerhouse. Three straight Brewers teams have gone deep into the 90s in wins and made double-digit mockeries of those projections.
Guess who again was pegged to win in the mid-80s this season?
Guess who’s scoffing at that when they aren’t too busy stacking victories?
“I’m sitting here on the inside seeing stuff that I think — I know — are positives, and obviously someone on the outside just isn’t seeing that,” ace pitcher Jacob Misiorowski told the Sun-Times a day after turning Cubs bats into powder. “I have no clue what those people are thinking.”
Said Yelich, “There’s a little extra pride when people don’t think you can do it, and people don’t think you can do it multiple times.”
But that only propels the Brewers so far.
“You can only ride the ‘Oh, they said we couldn’t do it’ for so long,” Yelich said. “At the end of the day, the motivation has to be internal and you have to have the right group of guys that care about the right things to go do that. I think that might be the most underrated part of this [team].”
But back to the division. Indeed — meep, meep! — the Brewers plan to confound and foil Wile E. Coyote yet again.
“It’s something we expect to do,” Misiorowski said.
“It’s the standard here,” Yelich said. “I think it’s a blessing to have those expectations and that kind of standard, because it’s taken a long time to build that and it’s something we take pride in.”
Just before Opening Day in Milwaukee, Yelich told a visiting scribe that people could keep waiting for the Brewers to “suck,” but he didn’t see them getting their wish.
“That’s definitely not changing this year,” he warned then.
And by the looks of things, why would it? The Brewers have a far superior run differential — plus-75 to the Cubs’ plus-28 — rooted in their outstanding starting pitching and bullpen. They get on base at a far higher clip than most, steal more bases, excel in myriad small ways and apply constant pressure to opponents — the lifeblood of a good team, as manager Pat Murphy sees it.
If the Brewers have a weakness, it’s that they’ve hit the fewest home runs (33) in the majors. But they’ve also allowed the fewest (35).
No, it didn’t count as a Brewers dinger when David Hamilton bounced a routine single under center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong’s glove, the ball rolled all the way to the wall and three runners — including Hamilton — scored to put the visitors up 3-0 in the second inning of the finale. The boos followed, for a struggling star who had a rough few days and, less so, for his scrambling team. Would PCA have whiffed on that ball against any other team? One wonders.
In Murphy, the Brewers have the winner of the last two NL Manager of the Year awards. In president of baseball operations Matt Arnold, they have baseball’s back-to-back executive of the year. They even went into the season with MLB Pipeline’s No. 1-ranked farm system, enhanced by returns in the trade of pitcher Freddy Peralta to the Mets.
These guys are running down the same road they always do. The Cubs can’t get rid of them.
“A huge part of this game is confidence and belief,” Yelich said. “You can do some special things when everybody’s headed in that direction.”
🚨 DAVID HAMILTON LITTLE LEAGUE HOME RUN 🚨 pic.twitter.com/P2rUVVfTiw
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) May 21, 2026
