CC Sabathia rests the ball in his glove as he faces the hitter, like an egg in a bird's nest, retrieving it only as he starts the windup that churns him into 290 pounds of left-handed menace. So apparently that purposeful starting point would be the only reason he needs a glove at all.

He didn't need it in yesterday's fourth inning at sunny, somnolent PNC Park, certainly not to contend with Nate McLouth's liner back through the middle with Freddy Sanchez on first and nobody out. Falling toward third after delivering his 0-2 pitch, Sabathia merely reached back with his bare hand and let McLouth's ball get lost in his left paw, then just as calmly threw to Prince Fielder at first to double off Sanchez and extinguish the only thing remotely resembling even the threat of a threat the Pirates would present.

Fielder caught the throw and let his hands drop to his sides as he stared at the massive Brewers pitcher.

"Are you serious?" he appeared to be saying. "Is there anything you can't do?"

Well, no; not really.

Sabathia, 6 feet 7 and the aforementioned 290, catches it, throws it, pitches it better than just about anybody, and in fact, given the increased opportunities to hit it now that he has been in the National League for almost two months, is a .257 career hitter with three homers. He has two this year, one more than Jason Kendall, and sent Jason Michaels to the track in left chasing his fifth-inning drive yesterday.

Did I mention the one-hitter?

Oh yeah, the one thing he couldn't do yesterday was pick Andy LaRoche's 30-foot roller out of the grass cleanly enough to throw him out in the home fifth, though it probably would not have mattered. For the record then, game time: 1:35 p.m. First and only Pirates hit, the LaRoche dribbler: 2:54 p.m.

"I should have picked it up with my glove," Sabathia said in a Brewers' clubhouse that bristled a bit over the loss of his no-hitter. "If I'd picked it up with my glove, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

OK, so maybe that glove comes in handy, even for him. Still, Sabathia was completely unfazed by his little brush with history, for it's a different strain of history that interests him far more.

"We won; we swept the series, that's the most important thing today," Sabathia said after stretching his phenomenal contribution to your 2008 Brewers to read 9-0 and a 1.43 earned run average.

For his 12th consecutive victory, his ninth since arriving in Milwaukee in a July 7 trade that sent four players to the Cleveland Indians to bring him into a pennant race, Sabathia allowed exactly three baseballs to be hit out of the infield. He struck out 11, 10 of them swinging, five of those the first time through the Pirates' order.

The Brewers, 49-40 and in third place that Monday in July, are now 80-56, five-and-a-half games ahead of everybody in the wild-card chase, and clearly the best team in the National League not named the Cubs. You might say it has worked out a little better than the three-team spasm that sent Manny Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who'd lost eight in a row until Saturday night and don't look fully capable of catching the totally ordinary Arizona Diamondbacks.

"He's been just great," Brewers manager Ned Yost said. "We've got 80 wins, and that's a big deal for us, 20 wins in August and we've just got to keep rollin'."

The expected arrival of the Brewers in the postseason will, of course, be a further embarrassment to the Pirates. In a market roughly two-thirds the size of Pittsburgh, the Brewers put Sabathia on a payroll that now settles in the area of $90 million, or roughly twice what the Pirates spend. Not surprisingly, Milwaukee will draw close to 3 million this season.

Sabathia and fellow rotation stud Ben Sheets are in their free agent years, so things will get awfully complicated in November, but between here and there, the Brewers figure to gain a national profile as big as Sabathia himself.

"I really do like the feel of this team," Sabathia said. "We've got just enough young guys who are hungry and enough veteran guys who's been through the pressure, Ray Durham, Craig Counsell, Jason Kendall. It's been pretty good for me here and I've been really comfortable. I just hope I can keep it up."

You mean never lose again; never allow a clean hit again?

That might be something Sabathia can't do. Might be.