In the rollercoaster ride that is a major league baseball season, the Milwaukee Brewers are currently in one of the dips. After starting the season off 4-9, the Crew was the best team in baseball over the next 27 games, going 21-6 from April 22nd to May 21st. Since that time, the Brewers have won only 10 times in 28 games and have fallen back to within 4 games of .500 for the first time since May 8th.

The hot streak of April/May seems like a distant memory at this point, largely because it was based on solid, inning eating starting pitching performances, and, since that time, one starter has landed in AAA (Manny Parra), one has landed on the DL (Dave Bush) and another has lost the effectiveness that he had shown early on (Braden Looper). Jeff Suppan and Yovanni Gallardo have been solid more often than not, but neither has been lights out effective in that time. The offense has been better than the starting pitching on balance, but has gone through extended slumps of its own and features several prominent members (Mike Cameron, JJ Hardy, Bill Hall) who have been dismal most of that time. The bullpen has held up its own, for the most part, though it is hard to know how long it can hold on with starters routinely failing to get out of the 4th or 5th inning.

So what is a general manager to do? After making the trade of the season in the middle of last year to acquire uber-starter CC Sabathia, there are expectations amongst many Brewers fans that he will pull off a major deal again to shore up this team's prospects heading to the stretch drive. Beyond the basic problem of it being fundamentally impossible for Melvin to match what he did by landing Sabathia last year in terms of impact, there is also the issue of trying to make a deal that makes sense for the Brewers now and later. When Melvin traded away top prospect Matt LaPorta and others for Sabathia last year, the team had been playing good baseball for well over a month leading up to the trade. Looking at the team, many people assessed (correctly, it turned out) that this was a move made to improve an already good baseball team and put them over the top and into the playoffs. The fundamental question facing Melvin as he heads to the trade deadline this season is: just how good is this baseball team?

If Melvin believes that this current slide is part of the normal ups and downs of a good baseball team, then it would make sense for him to deal some of the top prospects in the farm system for a few rental players to make another run at the playoffs. If, on the other hand, he decides that the rotation is just too thin and the lineup too full of holes for a few upgrades to be enough to get to close to 90 wins, he should probably hold off from dealing away too many valuable young pieces. Furthermore, he may want to look at unloading a few players to position himself to make some moves this offseason. That latter part would be a very tough sell to a fanbase that still is impatient for post season success, and would probably result in a PR backlash, but could be the best path to postseason success none the less.

So which path is the right one? It's honestly hard to say, because the team has been both very good and very bad for nearly equal portions of the season to this point. Which finally brings us to the main point: the next few weeks are shaping up to be of extreme importance to this season. If the players on hand want to get a shot at the postseason this year with this team, it would be in their best interest to give everything they have before the deadline to help convince Melvin that the right call is to trade off future assets for the here and now. If this group isn't good enough to keep it's head above water on it's own, it almost certainly isn't worth giving up much of the future to try to fill holes on an already leaky boat.