One of the truest adages in baseball is this one:  You only have as much momentum as the next day's starting pitcher.  Ned Yost took some flack last week when he told the media defiantly (as always) that there is no momentum in baseball.  The talk shows and blogosphere chewed that statement up and spat it onto the street, but Yost is more right than you might think.  Sure, good performances beget confidence, and confidence begets more good performances, so in that regard you can have a carryover effect.  However, that is for individuals, not for 25-man rosters.  Going "oh-fer" while your team wins doesn't buoy your confidence any, and if your pitcher stinks it doesn't matter how confident you are about your "hotness".  A baseball game is made up of dozens of confrontations between batters and pitchers and the vast majority of those participants are not terribly hot or cold.  The single-most important factor in the outcome of a baseball game is how good your starting pitcher was, thus the saying.

  To help illustrate the point, let's examine the current state of the Brewers.  Collectively hot with nine wins in ten games, the Brewers went on the road where they have stunk for two years and immediately started losing again.  Ben Sheets gave Milwaukee a good start, but the decision to exchange Carlos Villanueva for Guillermo Mota proved fatal in game one in Denver, and a bad start by Dave Bush in the second game tonight made the Brewers road-kill again, 7-2.  It isn't like one hot team ran into another and something had to give...on the contrary, the Rockies went into the weekend dead last in the NL West and one of the biggest disappointments in all of baseball in 2008 so far.  The local pundits anointed Colorado's comeback win on Friday night as the team's best win of the season.  Any point can be made with an extremely small sample of time in a baseball season, so don't get me wrong, I am not just coming to this conclusion because of a bad weekend.  It has been proven time and time again in baseball:  Major League games are individual events unto themselves.  How did the Brewers string together nine wins in ten games then, you ask, if there is no momentum, no carry-over effect?  They had nine quality starts in ten games.  Starting pitching.

  There is also no real reason that the Brewers should continually post such poor results on the road.  I don't think there is actually a TSA agent refusing the credentials of "Uncle Mo" at the airport.  They just haven't played well and, with the home team batting last along with other advantages for the non-traveling club, there is less of a margin for error and the result is more losses away from home.  If the team plays better (or has better talent), it will win more on the road.  There is no particular cure for losing on the road except finding more talented players who play better.  The Brewers played pretty well on the road early this year and started out 9-6 away from Miller Park.  There is no jinx.  Pitching is the key everywhere, as I've mentioned already, but I think that is even more true on the road.  If your starter goes out there and dominates for 7-8 innings, home or road, you are very likely to win.  If you have pitching weaknesses, it is really hard to win road games.  The Brewers currently have a road ERA for the season over 5.00 and a home ERA of 3.27.  The road record is now 13-20 after the 9-6 start.  'Nuff said. 

  So the Brewers are 0-2 on the road trip with four more to play.  The good news is that there is no particular reason they can't start winning road games tomorrow.  Jeff Suppan is the next day's starting pitcher.  We'll see what momentum he brings.