Day full of sighs for Brewers fans

Jeff Suppan was stellar Friday against Ryan Dempster and the Cubs, turning in five strong innings when the Brewers needed it most. AP

MILWAUKEE -- The rumor began, like so many do, here on the Internet. Or maybe it started in a bar, if you believe the guy who started the rumor. Either way, when a commenter on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Brewers Blog claimed, at 9:03 a.m. Friday, that Brewers shortstop J.J. Hardy had suffered a hand injury in the mosh-pit that greeted Ryan Braun's walkoff home run the previous evening -- and claimed that a source "just informed me that [Hardy] might be out for the rest of the season," it spread through Brewtown like Wild Card Wildfire.

The source was a guy, the commenter claimed, who "saw [manager Dale] Sveum in the bar last night."

It was a perfectly Milwaukeean delivery method, straight from the watering hole to the Web. By 11:31 a.m. it was on message boards, and by 12:59 p.m. the issue was discussed officially on the Journal-Sentinel's site, with the Brewers doing nothing to squash it. The team declined to comment until Hardy arrived at the ballpark for Friday's game against the Cubs. And thus the rumor raged on the radio and the Web all afternoon, supplanting the team's four-game winning streak as the topic du jour.

Forgive this town for being paranoid about baseball-related disasters. Brewers fans suffered through a collapse last August that kept them out of the playoffs; they suffered through another collapse this September, losing 15 of 19 to start the month. They've suffered through 1,982 different Ben Sheets ailments. They figured that this freak Hardy injury would be the latest thing to ensure their 26-year playoff drought continued into infinity. What timing, too, with them tied for the wild card with the Mets, and that supposedly cursed club from Chicago arriving in town -- the same team that has won 96 games this season, was 6-0 at Miller Park and had already clinched the National League Central. Who, again, were the cursed ones in this division?

A little before 4 p.m. Friday, Hardy strolled casually into the main area of the Brewers' clubhouse, wearing his full batting-practice jersey. Even Hardy's father had texted him that morning to ask what was up with the hand. The answer: nothing much. There were no bandages, no casts, no scrapes. He extended his left thumb and said, "I tweaked it last night in the celebration. It's nothing serious." He was written into the lineup, and he was playing. "I don't even know how [that rumor] got out," he said.

Brewers fans breathed the day's first sigh of relief. Hardy would go on to double off of Ryan Dempster and play a flawless game at short.

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The misinformation came, like it often does in the case of sports injuries, straight from the coach's mouth. And most of what the injured party said corroborated it. On Tuesday, Sveum had said it would take a "minor miracle" for Sheets (13-8, 2.89 ERA) -- who was battling soreness in his pitching elbow -- to throw on Saturday against the Cubs. On Wednesday, Sheets himself said he cut a bullpen session short at 20 pitches because his arm "wasn't hurting, but it wasn't doing anything else." He said he would pitch against the Cubs on Saturday if he could ... but also made it seem like it was highly doubtful that he could.

That, seemingly, left righty Dave Bush (9-10, 4.25) to start on three days' rest in the Brewers' penultimate regular-season game. Sveum said Thursday that Bush had a "rubber arm" and was ready to go. The Brewers' official notes, distributed before the game Friday, had Bush slotted as the Saturday starter. So forgive us for believing that to be the case. But Bush, when he was approached in the locker room on Friday to talk about it, said, merely, "I'm not talking about Saturday."

This was because Saturday's plans had changed. The baseball gods had seen fit to grant a small miracle to a certain right elbow in Milwaukee. In his daily dugout exchange with reporters, Sveum said, "[Sheets] is our starting pitcher for tomorrow's ballgame, and we'll just see how things go. He said he's feeling as good as he had in a month."

Apparently Sheets, the same guy who was so non-committal to starting just one day earlier, had looked Sveum in the eye and told him he was fine. And that, said Sveum, was "good enough for me. He's one of the best pitchers in baseball when he's healthy."

This would be the day's second sigh of relief for Brewer fans. Sheets, perhaps the the most fragile ace in the game, would be taking the mound once more in September.

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The false assumptions came, well, from pretty much everyone on the outside. The statistics made a compelling argument: Jeff Suppan, Milwaukee's Friday starter, was 0-3 with a 10.47 ERA in September, and had made it through 3.2 and 2 innings, respectively, in his previous two starts. The Cubs have the NL's scariest lineup, when Lou Piniella doesn't rest his starters. Suppan has a 9.00 ERA against the Cubs this season. Lou kept Alfonso Soriano, Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez and Geovany Soto in Friday's order. Suppan, it followed, was going to get shelled, and fast.

The Miller Park crowd held its breath for the shelling to commence. It never did. In the first, Suppan stranded two when Mike Cameron tracked down a Micah Hoffpauir shot to the gap, making a diving catch. Suppan then stranded runners in scoring position in the second, fourth and fifth, giving up just one run (on a solo homer by Jim Edmonds) and striking out five. The victims were Soriano, Lee, Ramirez (twice) and Hoffpauir. "[Suppan] had some big strikeouts against big-time hitters that have done well against him in the past," Sveum said. "He did what we expected out of him: five innings, 90 pitches (91, to be precise), and held them to one run."

Even Suppan, though, admitted that this start defied expectations: "It's been a battle for me of late," he said. "I was executing my pitches. For a pitcher like me" -- read: not an overpowering one -- "I have to have command and execute." The Mets, whom Suppan dominated in the 2006 NLCS -- with 15 innings of 0.60 ERA ball, earning his free-agent deal with the Brewers -- had to be scoreboard-watching in dismay from Shea. They had fallen behind the Marlins, and Suppan, halfway across the country, was foiling them again. The Mets' final score -- a 6-1 loss -- was posted at Miller Park soon after Rickie Weeks' three-run homer broke the Brewers' game open. The crowd, or at least the 60 percent who were Brewers fans, erupted, and Seth McClung, another unlikely star, took the 5-1 win to bed with four innings of scoreless, one-hit relief.

The thought had been that Friday was was the game the Brewers would not win, that Suppan vs. Dempster was a mismatch in the extreme. Like the rumors of Hardy's injury, and the speculation about Sheets' unreadiness, it turned out to be wrong. Like the rumors of Hardy's injury, and the speculation about Sheets' unreadiness, it turned out to be false. All that was left were some palatable truths: that the Brewers, for the first time since manager Ned Yost was fired on Sept. 15, are in the wild-card lead, with their destiny their hands, Sheets and CC Sabathia ready to take the hill, and the promised land very much in sight.