Is this Brewers series already a must-win for the Cardinals?

It feels trite to call any series in May a must-win series. After Sunday’s rainout against the Reds, the Cardinals still have 111 games to play, more than 68 percent of the season left to go. There’s a lot of baseball left to play, plenty that could still happen.

And yet, this week’s series against the Milwaukee Brewers sure feels season-defining.

The Cardinals, one of the pleasant surprises of the year, sit at 29-22, only a game-and-a-half behind the Brewers as of Sunday afternoon. The season so far has been, to put it lightly, a bundle of joy. Free from any expectations, it’s been enjoyable to watch this young team defy odds and expectations to stay competitive as the summer looms.

While nobody should let it become a killjoy for the season, it’s also fair to wonder if at some point the wheels will fall off, if we might look back at this stretch as the peak of the season.

In the midst of twelve consecutive games against NL Central rivals (eleven now after Sunday’s rubber match rainout against the Reds), those fears started to gain steam after the team lost two of three to the Pirates, followed by splitting the doubleheader against the Reds.

Amazingly, the series loss to the Pirates was their first dropped series since late April, when the team was swept by the Mariners at home.  After that Mariners series, the same foreboding sense of doom started to fill the air, and the team immediately righted the ship with a four-game sweep of the Pirates, followed by a huge series win against the mighty Dodgers.

Can the team do the same now?

Cardinals can prove their recent hiccups are just that in this Brewers series

Warning signs are certainly present. In the team’s first game against the Pirates last week, a spirited walk-off win masked one of the Cardinals’ sloppiest games all year, with a short start from Matthew Liberatore, and miscues defensively and on the basepaths.  The Cardinals then dropped the next two before salvaging a split with the Reds.

Now one of the season’s biggest tests looms against the division-leading Brewers, who have somehow pilfered some of that Cardinals Devils Magic to find themselves doing Brewers things again. The Cardinals will need the power surge they found in Cincinnati, as an absolute pitching gauntlet looms.  Jacob Misiorowski, with his 88 strikeouts on the season, takes the mound on Monday, while Kyle Harrison and his minuscule ERA awaits on Tuesday.

Nothing that happens over the next few days can take away the fun this season has already provided. From Tarps Off to Bryan Torres, to the emergence of Jordan Walker and JJ Wetherholt, this surprise first stretch of the season has been the most joyful Cardinals experience since 2022.

And even a sweep at the hands of the Brewers does not mean we’ll start to see a white flag waving from the foul pole at Busch. A weekend series at home against the Cubs, and the electric atmosphere that will likely bring, could offer a get-right tonic.

But it certainly already feels like an inflection point of the season. We may learn so much about this team over the next three days, including how an unexpected summer may play out.

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