Coming into the season, the Cardinals -- looking to snap a three-year postseason mini-drought -- figured to face an early test thanks to the schedule. 

Of their first 44 regular-season games of 2019, 20 are against teams that made the playoffs in 2018, and 30 of 44 come against teams that posted a winning season. That leaves 14 games against losing teams from a year ago. Well, those 14 games are against the the Padres, Reds, Mets, and Phillies -- all of whom range from modestly to drastically improved relative to 2018. That's a tough first quarter-plus of the season, and on paper it has the potential to put the Cardinals in a bad spot in the tough NL Central. 

Well, on Wednesday the Cardinals behind Adam Wainwright and homers from Marcell Ozuna and Yadier Molina topped the Brewers in St. Louis (STL 5, MIL 2) and in doing so completed a sweep. That pushes them to 15-9 on the season and, for the moment, a 1.5-game lead in the division. That record is backed up by a plus-33 run differential. 

That's impressive enough in a vacuum, but the Cardinals have achieved that start despite playing, to date, the third-toughest schedule in all of baseball, per opponents' average winning percentage (.551). Stated another way, the Cardinals are more than halfway through that aforementioned tough stretch, and they're doing more than just keeping their head above the waterline. Indeed, they have the NL's best winning percentage at this writing, thanks mostly to one of the league's best offenses. 

In part this is the nature of the National League in 2019. While the AL is peppered with non-competitive teams, in the NL only the Marlins (and perhaps Giants) profile as being truly bad. There's just not a lot of let-up in the schedule, especially if you're in the NL Central. Things do figure to lighten up a bit for the Cardinals after they get through that first 44-game swatch. Right now, they're most of the way through that, and things really couldn't be going much better.