Don’t look now, but the St. Louis Cardinals have the largest division lead in all of baseball.
Thursday’s victory over the Padres, combined with the Dodgers’ whomping of the Cubs (thanks in part of Russell Martin’s grand slam) have upped the Cards’ lead to 7 games.
(Check out the standings here)
The Cards are hot, no doubt about it, having just come off a winning series against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Now you might knock their schedule of late, as they’ve faced the Pirates, Reds, and Padres before the Dodgers. And now, the Padres again. In those games, St. Louis is 11-2.
Rip the schedule all you want, but good teams do tend to beat up on bad ones. And bad teams, well, they do whatever the Cubs are doing.
With the Cubs trying to figure out how to blame it all on a goat, the Brewers having essentially thrown in the towel at the trade deadline, and the Astros breaking new ground in sleepy-eyed mediocrity, a division that looked pretty tight only a couple weeks ago is suddenly taking on the characteristics of a runaway.
Is it over? Of course not. But even Bluto Blutarsky is beginning to have his doubts.
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