ST. LOUIS -- There was one of the worst slumps of Nolan Arenado’s career, Jack Flaherty’s lackluster fastball and Willson Contreras struggling so mightily to connect to his new pitching staff that the Cardinals bumped him from behind home plate just a few months after inking a five-year, $87.5 million contract. If you’ve followed St. Louis at all this season, you know that’s just scratching the surface of the melodrama.

But you wouldn’t have known it watching the Cardinals wallop the Brewers at Busch Stadium on Monday, 18-1, to match the most lopsided losses in franchise history. It featured Flaherty and Contreras combining for seven vintage, scoreless innings buoyed by Arenado’s three-run home run off Freddy Peralta in the first, before the game slipped so thoroughly away from the Brewers that infielder Mike Brosseau became the first Milwaukee position player to pitch this season during a 10-run inning for the Cardinals in the eighth.

You certainly wouldn’t have known that 7 1/2 games separated the first-place Brewers from the last-place Cardinals at the start of the day from listening to Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell assess the opponent in the hours before this latest meeting of National League Central rivals.

“I think it’s a good baseball team that went through a rough patch,” Counsell said.

Calling the Cardinals’ first six or seven weeks of the season “a rough patch” was quite kind. St. Louis ended the month of April 10 games out of first place for the first time in 116 years. But they looked every bit the reigning division champions on Monday behind Flaherty, who discovered his fastball velocity somewhere along the way of escaping a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the top of the first inning and perhaps preventing the night from going a different direction.

And they roughed up Peralta on a night the Brewers right-hander said he “didn’t have anything,” getting Arenado’s three-run homer on a hanging slider in the first inning, four more runs off Peralta and Bryse Wilson in the sixth to make it an 8-0 game, and 10 more runs off Brewers Rule 5 pick Gus Varland and Brosseau in the eighth to make the sort of history Milwaukee would rather have avoided.

It marked the 11th time in Brewers history that they surrendered at least 18 runs, the last coming in a 21-5 loss at Dodger Stadium in 2018. Varland became the first pitcher in Brewers history and the 21st in AL/NL history to surrender at least nine earned runs in a game without completing a full inning. The most recent was the Cards’ Carlos Martinez in 2021.

Then there was Flaherty, who held the Brewers scoreless on three hits for seven innings with two walks and 10 strikeouts. In his previous two starts this month, he’d surrendered 13 earned runs on 16 hits in 7 1/3 innings.

“We were playing good ball,” Brewers first baseman Rowdy Tellez said. “But sometimes you hit a brick wall. You climb over and start the next one fresh.”

“As a team, we’ve got to leave that one behind,” Peralta said.

The Brewers have two games remaining in the series to cool the surging Cardinals. Since falling a season-worst 14 games under .500 on May 6, the Cardinals have won seven of their past eight games.

“We know that they have a very good team and very good hitters,” Peralta said. “We’re in the same division, and that’s why we’re trying to win the series against them because we know they have a very good team.”

There is urgency, even in the middle of May. Last year, the Brewers hit a rough patch that happened to coincide with some of their regular-season games against the Phillies, only to settle into a race with Philadelphia for the NL’s final postseason berth at the end of the year. Because those berths are no longer settled by tiebreaker games and instead start with head-to-head-record, the Brewers found themselves not merely needing to catch the Phillies, but pass them.

They failed to do so, and Milwaukee’s streak of four straight postseason appearances came to an end.

So, these head-to-head games against the Cardinals are big. After Wednesday, the teams don’t meet again until Sept. 18-21 in St. Louis and Sept. 26-28 in Milwaukee.

“I think going through this last year a little bit, we did learn at the end of last year that the tiebreaker matters,” Counsell said Monday afternoon. “I don’t think you can plan your season around a tiebreaker, but we know that these games matter from that perspective.

“When we play them [on the schedule], you don’t control that. That’s the schedule. But I do think you try to put your best foot forward in these division games against these teams that you feel like will be there in the end.”