August 14, 2008
Offensive Outage
The St. Louis Cardinals shutout the Florida Marlins 3-0 to take the series three games to one. With Johnson, Sanchez and Volstad in the rotation, the Marlins offense seems to be taking the month off. They've scored 4.7 runs per game over all, but only 3.2 runs per game so far in August. They're just 5-8 in the month, and lost a chance to gain on the Phillies as the Mets have done.
The Cardinals close the gap with Milwaukee to three games. They only averaged four runs a game in the series, but that was enough to beat a Marlins team that lost it's power.
I guess Milwaukee's cruise to the playoffs just hit some rocks or an iceberg or an oceanic speed bump.
The Brewers are the favorites for the wild card simply because they have the lead and it's getting late. But they're not all that good a team, certainly not significantly better than the Cardinals or Phillies or Mets.
I can see the Cardinals, for instance, playing four games better than Milwaukee over the remainder of the season. The Brewers just enjoyed their best stretch of play during the season but still couldn't put away the wild card.
The alternative to your hypothesis that the Marlins forgot how to hit is that the Cards can actually pitch. This despite the fact that everyone seems to believe that the Cards rotation sucks. If you look back at the Cubs series last weekend, the highest scoring NL team did not do a whole lot of scoring against the Cards either. It seems the Cards starting pitching has been given short shrift all year.