St. Louis Cardinals: Can They Sweep the Brewers En Route to Division Title?

Today the St. Louis Cardinals trail the Milwaukee Brewers by 2.5 games in the NL Central. They also start a three-game series in St. Louis against the same team. Can they sweep the Brew Crew and ride that sweep to the NL Central title?

First, the bad news. The Cards are 2-4 against Milwaukee this season.

Now the worse news. They are 0-3 in Milwaukee. 

The Brewers have a strange split. They are 21-35 on the road and 39-14 at home. It's a pretty extreme disparity. It's indicative of a team built to hit at home. They have a team OPS of .811 at home and .692 on the road.

The Cardinals have some things going for them, though.  

It will be the first time the Cardinals field their post-trade deadline team as a whole when they take the field tonight. It won't just be the fact they're together, it will be the hype and the belief that comes with it. 

The Cardinals are starting to generate the feeling of a team that believes in itself. Matt Holliday, Albert Pujols and Lance Berkman are all healthy at the same time. When the three of them start together the team puts put 5.4 runs per game. 

Rafael Furcal is going to be leading off, filling the one weak spot in their lineup. More importantly he'll be fielding the shortstop position, shoring up their biggest defensive weakness.

The newly constructed bullpen is intact.

The Cards are feeling good about themselves, as they should. You could easily argue that in spite of their being 2.5 games down they are a better team. Their Pythagorean wins have them five games better than Milwaukee. That's the sort of thing that tends to even out over the course of the season, especially when one team is getting over injury problems and the other is starting to experience them.

They also have the top of their order coming around, with Chris Carpenter, Jaime Garcia and the newly acquired Edwin Jackson facing off against the Brewers.

Carpenter promises to set an early trend to the series as well, as he's been hitting his stride the last seven starts, going 6-1 over that span with a 2.21 ERA.

While Garcia has been an absolute star at home all season, giving up only a 1.56 ERA at Busch Stadium, he's struggled on the road. His last two road starts have shown an improvement, though, as he's only yielded two earned runs in 14 innings pitched. 

Jackson was outright stellar in his debut for the Cards, giving up only one run in seven innings of work.

There is a chance for the Cards to not just win, but sweep the series. It will give them a chance to turn the tables on Milwaukee, who swept the Redbirds the last time they came calling.

If they pull it off, though, it will be interesting to watch what happens. Last year they beat the Reds in a critical series only to spiral immediately after and end up falling out of the hunt before season's end. They'll need to not only win, but put their foot on the gas if they can get the sweep.

Carpenter is quoted on Yahoo:

"

Instead of winning one or two, losing two, winning three, losing two…hopefully we'll put together that stretch where we win six, seven, eight in a row and then maybe another six, seven, eight in a row. We haven't done that yet. And we need to."

"

Now would be a great time to start a streak like that.