CINCINNATI (MCT) – This might be rock bottom.

Four times this month, the Milwaukee Brewers have been able to say, “At least we have CC starting.” And four times, CC Sabathia, the stopper, has kept the team in games.

The Brewers won the first two games, although Sabathia doesn’t have a victory by his name as proof. But last week he took the loss in his third start of the month, against the Chicago Cubs, owners of the best record in the National League.

This latest loss came against the fifth place Cincinnati Reds, 4-3, on Saturday at Great American Ball Park, in a desperate time when the Brewers felt it necessary to pitch Sabathia on three days of rest for the second time in his career. But not even the Cy Young Award and MVP candidate could pull them out of their funk, which has them 2 games behind the New York Mets in the wild-card standings.

So what now?

“We’ve got to get a win,” interim manager Dale Sveum said. “We got seven games left now. It’s definitely an uphill battle.

“It’s getting to that point where, realistically, you have to win every game.”

Right now the Brewers are having trouble winning one, even with Sabathia pitching 5 2/3 innings and allowing one earned run.

Murphy’s Law – whatever can go wrong will go wrong – applies to this team now. The breaks it got in August are absent in September, and no one would blame the players if they knelt at the altars of the baseball gods and asked what they had done to anger them.

“Every now and then you think that,” first baseman Prince Fielder said. “But then again, sometimes you make the other team say that.”

There haven’t been many of those times lately.

Sabathia gave up a run on three consecutive singles in the first inning but settled down and retired 15 of the next 17 batters he faced without giving up another.