Baseball is a Funny Game

Major league baseball has the fairest regular season of any sport. One-hundred-sixty-two games will sort out any pretenders. I still believe the Brewers will be in the thick of playoff contention come late September - if they haven't run away from the mediocrity that is the NL Central. They are still a very young team and are going to have extreme ups and downs. The starting infielders are all 24, except for newcomer Ryan Braun and he's 23.

Within the confines of the 162-game proving ground, however, you will also find wild variations and random acts of weirdness. On Sunday, the Brewers hammered out 22 hits against Texas and needed a three-run homer in the 12th inning by Geoff Jenkins to win it. In their very next game Detroit's young pitching star Justin Verlander tossed a no-hitter at the Crew. He supposedly was still throwing 102 mph in the 9th inning.

Verlander fanned 12 hitters and that's one thing that worries about Milwaukee (aside from Bill Hall's fielding and their defense in general) - they still strike out too much. However, a check of the stats shows they are only 7th worst in the NL out of 16 teams in strikeouts while they are second in home runs and 7th in runs.