Cubs win series but have bigger fish to fry than Brewers right now, even as ‘the Central runs through them’

MILWAUKEE – “Tell them you got in a Lyft and the driver said the Mets suck!”That’s what greeted me when I touched down in New York last Monday.Over the course of the next four days, it turned out my hilarious, all-around stereotypical New Yorker of a Lyft driver – shoutout to Larry – was right.The Cubs dealt the Mets a four-game sweep that sparked team brass in New York to fire the manager.Even as an avalanche of pitching injuries threatened to bury them – and still could – the Cubs looked all sorts of back in Queens, scoring 33 runs in three days.That offensive funk? No more. Instead, the offense was grooving. It was just plain funky.And then? The Brewers.“The Brewers are the cream of the crop,” starting pitcher Matthew Boyd said Sunday. “They’ve won the division three years in a row and multiple years before that.“The Central runs through them, we all know that.”The Cubs pulled a rabbit-sized 4-3 win out of their hats Sunday, scoring three runs in the top of the 10th inning and narrowly avoiding disaster in the bottom half, all despite getting only four hits off Brewers pitching on the afternoon.It sent the Cubs, who took the series, winning two out of three, back down I-94 feeling a lot better than they did after last October’s NLDS.But if the Brewers showed one thing, even in a series loss, it’s that they’re no Mets.The supposed soft spot in the Cubs’ schedule is over, with 21 straight games against teams that started June below .500 now in the rearview mirror. They didn’t start that stretch so hot, but they emerged from an offensive malaise by the end.Just in time for their pitching staff to go on the fritz.It’s not so much poor performance as bad injury luck....