THE SENSE OF URGENCY COMES TOO LATE.

The Milwaukee Brewers' regression to the mean continues, and now, only now, does sports scribe Tom Haudricourt note what has been evident for some time.  "The Brewers will not get to the postseason playing like this."  When the Cardinals got off to a slow start this season, I doubt that any sports scribes in St. Louis excused it as "rebuilding" or "injuries" or "the weather" or any of the other ills to which a baseball team is heir.  Come September, though, it had better be the Cardinals running down the Brewers and the Cubs, and excusing the Pirates and the Reds.

The 5-2 loss to the Cardinals on Friday night at Busch Stadium gave the Brewers a 5-9 record in the month of August. Going back to the all-star break, they are 13-13. Going back even further to July 8, when they were a season-high 18 games over .500 (54-36), the Brewers have gone 14-20.

Simply put, this cannot continue. Not if the Brewers want to end their seven-year playoff drought, even if it's merely the second wild-card berth and winner-take-all game on the road.

Read the column for the analysis, the second-guessing, what have you, if you wish.

That's not what matters.  On Thursday, the Green Bay Packers won the Shrine Charity Game in Green Bay.  Opponent doesn't matter.  Score doesn't matter.  What matters is that sports scribes covering the Packers for the same news organization were fretting about things like signing another outside linebacker and finding reinforcements at reserve left tackle.  (That matters a lot when your offense depends on a right-handed quarterback with a fragile clavicle.)

At the end of last football season, I noted, "Will that shakeup [in the front office and among the coordinators] lead to a more resilient team, continuing to contend and make deep playoff runs, or are we entering another quarter-century of frustration?"

In Packer Nation, any season that doesn't run late into January is a failed season.  The sports punditry get that, and reinforce that.  Their baseball counterparts are still content with "close enough" until it's too late.