As the Cubs surge, they're hot on the heels of a suddenly struggling Brewers team

After dropping their third straight game and suffering a sweep at the hands of the San Diego Padres, Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy had one message for his team during a 15-minute team meeting at Petco Park.

“Just worry about ourselves and keep rolling and keep fighting, keep playing the way we have. We can't look behind. We have to play the way we play."

Well, if the Brewers do look behind them, they're going to see a scorching hot Chicago Cubs team that has dramatically closed the gap in the National League Central this week, pulling within three games of first - the closest they've been to their hated rivals since May 24.

As recently as July 24, the Brewers had nearly 90 percent odds of winning the division, but coming off a huge flurry of trade deadline moves, Craig Counsell's Cubs have cut into those odds in a big way. Milwaukee entered Thursday still as heavy favorites, but the odds of winning the NL Central for a fourth straight year have fallen to 70.2 percent, according to FanGraphs.

The Cubs' odds, meanwhile, have climbed north of 30 percent and, while that might not feel like much of a chance, the team will have the opportunity to control its own destiny in the coming weeks. Chicago and Milwaukee go head-to-head seven more times before the end of the regular season, starting with a four-game set that opens on Aug. 31.

Cubs and Brewers head-to-head matchups will decide the NL Central

On the year, the Brewers control the season series, two games to four. But this isn't the same Cubs team Murphy's crew handled earlier in the year. A revamped pitching staff is now a major strength and the three-headed monster of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki and Alex Bregman has the offense putting up crooked numbers and erasing deficits on a nightly basis.

And to tilt the scales in favor of the Cubs even more, especially in the short-term, the Brewers now square off with the Dodgers in a four-game weekend series in an NLCS rematch. Los Angeles' probables for that series? Rōki Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Justin Wrobleski and Tarik Skubal.

Meanwhile, it's on the Cubs to keep it rolling and finish off the series in D.C. before coming home for a six-game homestand against the Cardinals and White Sox. But the heated NL Central rivals are trending in contrasting directions right now - opening the door, just a crack, to the idea Chicago might have what it takes to bring home a division crown in a full-length season for the first time in nearly a decade.

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