OPINION

By Sean Deveney

updated 5:37 p.m. ET Sept. 4, 2007

Sean Deveney

On the underside of Ben Sheets' right middle finger, just below the skin, sits a tendon, surrounded by a layer of tissue called a sheath. On July 14, after throwing a high fastball to the Colorado Rockies' Todd Helton, Sheets — who has been the Milwaukee Brewers' ace for his entire seven-year major league career — felt a pop in the distal joint (the one closest to the nail) of the finger. What he was feeling was a tearing of the tendon's sheath. It is, on a physical scale, a tiny injury. But for a pitcher, it's murder.

The tear sent Sheets to the disabled list for the fifth time in three seasons and, combined with a nasty blister problem, kept him off the mound for 46 days.

They were days of angst and Bromo Seltzer in Milwaukee. Without Sheets, the Brewers fell into a 15-26 spiral, and their team ERA, which was 4.13 with Sheets, was 5.37 without him. The 3 1/2-game NL Central lead that Milwaukee owned when Sheets went down vanished. "That," Sheets says, "was a bad feeling. I can't even describe it. Kind of an empty feeling. You wait seven years to be part of something, and to not be part of that August — that was a tough situation."

But empty feelings and tough situations are nothing unusual in the Central. It is, simultaneously, baseball's worst division and its most entertaining. Here, every team features big, honking blisters — plus warts and carbuncles — and the bizarre is the rule. Take Milwaukee. To change their flagging luck, about 20 Brewers got crew cuts before a mid-August game against the Cardinals. They still lost, 8-0.

Or there are the cantankerous Chicago Cubs, with their early-June battery spattery between pitcher Carlos Zambrano and catcher Michael Barrett. Zambrano left Barrett (later traded to the San Diego Padres) in need of six stitches, but somehow Chicago has since gone 47-35. And the St. Louis Cardinals, once 10 1/2 games out, slipped into the picture thanks in part to a .328 August batting average by new outfielder Rick Ankiel, who, not so long ago, was starting pitcher Rick Ankiel. "It's a little bit strange," says Cubs infielder Ryan Theriot. "You look around and everybody in our division had their ups and downs. So, no one really took control of it. But, someone's got to win."

That's true — baseball rules require that the NL Central have a champion. After taking two of three from the Brewers at Wrigley Field last week, the Cubs were the only Central team above .500 and had pushed their advantage to 2 1/2 games, making their claim on the division that no one else seems to want. As Cubs manager Lou Piniella notes, "It seems like we're in a pennant race, but I'm not so damn sure."

That slim edge, combined with superior pitching, a deep bench and the presence of leadoff man Alfonso Soriano, has the Cubs heading into the stretch with the least-flawed roster in the most flawed division. "I feel good now," says Soriano, who suffered a tiny tear of his own, deep in his quadriceps, that put him out of the lineup for three weeks. "No pain at all. I feel I am ready for September."

The Cubs were lampooned for handing a $136 million contract to Soriano in the offseason, but if the team is truly September-ready, it's because Soriano feels good at the top of the lineup. He remains one of the most fearsome low-ball hitters in baseball, and he provided a key run in the Cubs' 5-4 win in the third game of the Brewers series when he knocked his 19th home run on a pitch that seemed to nuzzle his ankles. Soriano is not an ideal leadoff hitter — his on-base percentage is just .335, and he has struck out 100 times — but the Cubs are 56-44 when he bats first. They're 14-21 when he bats elsewhere or doesn't play.

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