The Cardinals are playing great baseball and I simply can't deny them that. What is bugging the shit out of me is the fact that they're doing it while the Cubs are simply having awful luck. Here's a frightening fact from the folks at the Chicago Tribune:

"From the Opening Day roster, only Matt Clement, Moises Alou, Corey Patterson, Todd Walker, Michael Barrett, LaTroy Hawkins, Paul Bako, Derrek Lee and Kyle Farnsworth have yet to leave a game with an injury or spend time on the disabled list."

That's nuts. I've heard of teams catching the injury bug, but this is just ridiculous.

The worst luck of all for the Cubs: after the game this afternoon, the Cubs and Cardinals will not face each other again in 2004, barring a meeting in the playoffs. That's it. God forbid, if they do lose today, they will be 10 games back without a single game against the team they're chasing. That's pretty bad. The Cubs haven't had sole possession of first place in the Central Division since April 29th. This is a team that was expected to win the World Series and they haven't even shared first place but 17 days out of the season. Again, pretty bad.

There is something that we Cub fans can hold onto. That April 29th date is important. They lost 4 guys at the beginning of the season or before it even started. Mark Grudzielanek went down April 10th. That was it for the month, which led to a 13-9 record. They lost six guys in May (Alex Gonzalez, Kerry Wood, Kent Mercker, Sammy Sosa, Todd Wellemeyer and Tom Goodwin) which led to a 14-14 record.

July has seemed to go directly against this logic, however. The Cubs are now 7-8 this month while only without Joe Borowski and Todd Hollandsworth. As clutch as Hollandsworth has been, Borowski is far more missed. The bullpen is simply killing the Cubs in game after game, last night's being a rare exception.

All in all, it's still too early to completely count the Cubs out, but it's difficult to do anything but. Since sweeping the White Sox, the Cubs have lost 8 of their last 11 while the Cardinals have only lost 2 of 11. It's easy to count them out. The law of averages should balance this hot streak of the Cardinals out with this cold streak of the Cubs, but no law will change the fact that these two won't see each other until at least the NLCS.

There's always the Wild Card, right? I mean, heck, the last two World Series Champions were Wild Card teams. It's obviously far too early to tell, but if the Cubs get in as the Wild Card, and the three division leaders stay the same, the Cubs would play Los Angeles in the first round. In three poorly-played games, the Cubs game away with 1 win. However, last season the Braves owned the Cubs, who turned the favor, come October.

This Cubs team is good. They just need to figure that out for themselves.