Fast-starting Milwaukee has history on its side

	First baseman Prince Fielder is flourishing in his second full season, hitting .295 with 11 home runs and 32 RBIs. Mike Ehrmann/WireImage.com
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There's a little parlor game sweeping baseball, particularly now that Milwaukee, now playing the varsity portion of its schedule, has dropped three of its past four games after a 24-10 start. The game is to guess, Are the Brewers for real? Most teams that play .700 baseball for the first 34 games, as Milwaukee did, would be exempt from such talk, but we're talking about a franchise that clinched its last winning season with Robin Yount and Paul Molitor in the lineup, which hasn't played a playoff game in a quarter of a century, which hasn't put together back-to-back winning months in six years, features barley in its logo and a pack of running sausages that may be the most nationally recognizable players on the team.

In other words, it's been hard to take the Brewers seriously -- until now. Let the parlor game end. Milwaukee is for real. It may be the fourth best team in the National League, but it's good enough to win the 85 games it might take to win the Central. At the very least, Milwaukee will be showing a whole generation of young fans what a pennant race looks like. How can I be sure? A handful of reasons:

1. History. Teams just don't start the season 24-10, as Milwaukee did, and completely collapse. Or, if you'd like to look at it another way, crummy teams don't play this well for this long.

The Brewers are the 13th team in the wild-card era to start a 162-game season by playing .700 baseball over 34 games (one-fifth of the season). Eight of the previous 12 such fast-starting teams made the playoffs. All of them finished with at least 85 wins.

Want a bigger sample? Consider the entire history of the 162-game schedule, going back to 1961. There were 32 teams that previously played .700 baseball in their first 34 games. Only nine of them didn't make the playoffs. And here is the breakdown of those 32 teams by final win total:

Fewer than 81 wins: 0
81-83 wins: 2 (1966 Indians and 1972 Mets)
85 wins or more: 30

Bottom line: History tells us the Brewers are good for at least 85 wins, which would at least put them in a pennant race, if not the postseason.

2. Pitching. Unlike the Orioles and Nationals from 2005, Milwaukee has started fast with solid pitching as its foundation. It began this week leading the NL in fewest walks, best strikeout-to-walk rate and fewest blown saves and ranking second in opponents' OBP -- the kind of stats that suggest this is not a fluke.

Mike Maddux has always been one of the best, if underrated, pitching coaches in the game, but the word is getting out about how he has turned around Matt Wise, Derek Turnbow, Francisco Cordero, Claudio Vargas and Chris Capuano -- of whom have pitched better for Milwaukee than elsewhere.

"And Ben Sheets [3-2, 4.10 ERA] is going to pitch better," Brewers GM Doug Melvin says of his ace. "We feel good about sending a pitcher out there every night who gives us a legitimate chance to win. In the past here we had people [starting] where you hoped you could score enough runs for them."