Well, here’s the facts, Jack– the baseball season is one quarter of the way done. The Crew is in last place, 7.5 games behind the Cubs. If they’re going to live up to ANYONE’S expectations for this year, including their own, they’ve got their work cut out for them. One of the positive ways to spin their current plight is to note that Chicago was, at one point, 8.5 games behind the Brewers last year and won the division. The bad side of that point is that it would take a meltdown, of, well, Milwaukeean proportions for this thing to come together…

You figure 90 victories will still win the division. Nobody’s running away at this point to make that speculation any different. With their 118 remaining games, the Brewers would have to go 70-48. No small task. Another positive to take away is that out of these first 44 games, they’ve played 25 on the road. That means 63 more home dates versus 55 more on the road, and 7 of those are coming up in the course of this week. Once they get back, they’ll have quite a bit of the home-cookin’ from here on out. But we’re still talking about maintaining an overall .600 winning percentage, and the Brewers are just 11-9 at home.

What if they split the rest of the road games (which is what you kind of need to do, at a minimum, to be a winning ballclub)? Let’s say they go 27-28 the rest of the year on the road. They’d have to be 43-20 at home, a .680 winning percentage. Phew.

Baseball involves a LOT of numbers, and you’ll find no shortage of ways to dissect everything about the sport out on the ‘tubes, the TV, or in the paper. In the end, this is just another way of saying, “It ain’t early. It’s starting to be desperate.”