Pete Crow-Armstrong’s potential MVP-winning, 40-40 season might go down as the best individual year for the Chicago Cubs, a charter National League franchise founded in 1876, around the time of Lake Shore Drive’s original construction and before the creation of the city’s elevated train system.By launching his 40th home run during Sunday’s 10-3 loss to the Miami Marlins at loanDepot park, Crow-Armstrong joined Hall of Famer Billy Williams as the franchise’s only left-handed hitters with a 40-homer season.Meanwhile, a torrent of pitching injuries somehow hasn’t destroyed the club’s playoff chances, which the public projection systems had between 99.8 percent and 99.9 percent entering Sunday’s games. The Cubs, the first team to hit 200 home runs this season, also lead the majors in fielding percentage, fielding run value and outs above average.Jed Hoyer’s front office emerged as one of the clear winners at the trade deadline by adding two potential playoff starters with extensive postseason experience (Clay Holmes and Kevin Gausman), a complementary outfielder (Tyrone Taylor) for a deep group of position players and a late-inning reliever (Ryan Zeferjahn) who needs to be locked in during the playoffs.Yet this Labor Day snapshot still shows the Cubs looking up at the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Central standings. Winning the division this year is close to a mathematical impossibility for the Cubs, the major-market team with a vastly higher payroll and a former Brewers manager in their dugout, yet facing a seven-game deficit.Craig Counsell, the Cubs manager and a Wisconsin resident, will still get booed throughout the three-game series against the Brewers that begins Monday afternoon at American Family Field.How a 90-mile stretch could decide the World SeriesKen Rosenthal“Look, we get 13 chances to play the Brewers,” Counsell said. “Other than that, we don’t have any control over the Brewers. They got to go play their games, and we go play our games. They’re on pace for a big number. They’re (around) a 100-win pace. That’s hard to keep up with. Go ask the rest of Major League Baseball — that’s just hard to keep up with.“‘Disappointed’ is not the right word. They’re a good team. I’m not surprised by that. Not surprised at all. We’re a good team. We’re not a 100-win team. We’re not going to be a 100-win team this year. That’s the story right now, and we got games in front of us.”Now closing in on their sixth division title in nine years, the Brewers are clearly operating at a higher level than the rest of the NL Central. But the current talent gap between the Cubs and the Brewers is not enormous.Since Milwaukee won the decisive Game 5 in last year’s best-of-five NL Division Series, the Cubs are 4-6 through 10 games against the Brewers this season. Milwaukee’s plus-5 run differential during those 10 rivalry games is minimal.For the Cubs, the season’s final three weeks will revolve around seeing if Crow-Armstrong can wrap up his NL MVP Award, identifying relievers Counsell can trust in the biggest moments and securing home-field advantage for the first round of the playoffs as a wild card.“The guys in that room, they got a lot to say about tonight,” Counsell said at the start of last week’s 2-2 series split against the Brewers at Wrigley Field. “And they don’t got much to say about Sept. 17 right now. We got to worry about tonight.“Does everybody want to play at home, as many games as we can? Absolutely, absolutely. Are we going to shy away from a challenge on the road? Nope. That’s how we look at it. And that’s how every competitor looks at it.”The Cubs have already won each season series against their three primary challengers in the NL wild-card race, going 15-4 combined against the Philadelphia Phillies, Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres. That tiebreaker edge essentially gives the Cubs an extra one-game cushion in the wild-card standings, which currently look like this:Cubs (81-63), +5