Although it's going to be very tough to swallow this year if the Brewers don't make the playoffs after having a big division lead for so much of the season, people should not be surprised. Baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, and normally the 162 game regular season sorts out who the best teams are.
In this case, barring a huge collapse in the last week of the season by the Cubs, the fact that the Brewers will likely fail to win their division can be blamed on one thing: pitching. The Brewers this year simply did not have good enough pitching to allow them to win. The Cubs have better pitching. It's as simple as that.
It is easy to forget when offense gets so much of the attention and glory in sports how important pitching remains in baseball. It's particularly frustrating when a team puts together a lineup packed with good hitters. The fans, the announcers and the news media all tend to rate the team based on their hitting and then act surprised and dismayed when they don't do as well as everyone was expecting.
I learned this lesson very painfully from 1978 through 1981 with the Brewers. They won many, many games those years with great hitting and decent defense. But year after year New York or Baltimore would come in with teams that maybe didn't have as many great hitters but did have the pitching every year until 1982 one or both of them would end up ahead of Milwaukee in the final standings. Baltimore in particular, was very frustrating. They simply had a good, balanced team with a smart manager. Even though they didn't hit 200 home runs a year, they had clutch hitters, excellent defense and excellent pitching. The Brewers may have been more exciting, but Baltimore just won more.
In 1982 they finally made it. Why? Because by then they had added pitchers like Pete Vukovich and Rollie Fingers. They added Don Sutton near the end of the season. They had their best offensive year ever. Even then, they just squeaked by. It came down to the last day of the season against the Orioles.
The Brewers seem to be on the right track this year, but if fans don't want to be disappointed, they need to realize that in baseball you never had enough pitching and you never have enough talent. If they expected to really make a run this year, they obviously needed more pitching. Oh, I know that they tried, by adding Suppan during the off season and Linebrink in August, but neither of them has really panned out for them.
Perhaps the worst thing has been the collapse of Capuano this year. When it's all over, perhaps he is the reason the Brewers will not make it. As far as we know, he has not been injured this year, yet he has failed. If he had even been 500 this year, the Brewers would likely have a lead going into the final homestand of the season.