Bauers Breaks His Toe, and the Brewers' Margin Gets a Little Thinner

Jake Bauers fouled a ball off his right foot Monday night in a 3-0 loss to San Francisco, and by Tuesday the news was confirmed: broken big toe, time to be determined. It's the kind of injury that sounds minor until you remember that Bauers has been the offensive engine of a first-place team — a 1.002 OPS through 70 games, 17 home runs, the bat the lineup has leaned on hardest while the rotation fell apart around it.

The Brewers are 63-37 and still in front in the NL Central, so nothing about this is a crisis in the standings sense. But the timing is genuinely lousy. Milwaukee has been scoring 5.1 runs a game over its last 10, and that offensive surge is the main reason a 7-3 stretch has stayed afloat despite the pitching staff allowing 4.4 runs a night. Lose the middle of that equation and the math gets harder fast. Andrew Vaughn is hitting .333 and can hold down first base, and the depth chart has options, but nobody in this lineup has been doing what Bauers was doing.

The Brewers already have ten players on the injured list, including four on the 60-day. Woodruff's shoulder, Harrison's forearm, a rotation held together with emergency depth and newly acquired arms — and now this. My read is that the next two weeks will tell us a lot about how much cushion that 63-37 record actually represents. The lead is real. The margin for error is not what it was.