Anyone who still complains that baseball teams from small markets can’t compete and that baseball teams that don’t play their home games in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Boston seem not to matter, ought to set aside some time tomorrow night. The most glamorous game of the week will be played by the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Milwaukee Brewers. Baseball is changing.

This is a game with playoff implications. The Brewers, who looked like the best team in the league for much of the first half, have fallen on hard times. Not only have the Chicago Cubs overtaken them in the National League Central, but the St. Louis Cardinals, who were 9.5 games back at the end of June, have crept into contention as well. Meanwhile, the Diamondbacks lead in the West despite having actually been outscored by their opponents. The teams’ playoff hopes might be taken as all the comment one needs on the state of the senior circuit, but these teams feature some of the most exciting young talent in the game, players like MVP candidate Prince Fielder and freakishly talented rookie Justin Upton. Success for the Diamondbacks and Brewers is good for baseball.

What really makes the matchup, though, is Arizona ace Brandon Webb, who’s pitched three consecutive shutouts as part of a 42-inning scoreless streak. A complete game shutout tomorrow would leave him nine innings short of breaking Orel Hershiser’s record 59-inning scoreless streak, set 19 years ago in a year in which Hershiser carried a relatively unimpressive Los Angeles Dodgers team all the way to a world championship, breaking the hearts of all Mets fans in so doing.

Somewhat ridiculously, this streak has seen Webb, who is, after all, the reigning Cy Young award winner, burst forth as if from nowhere to claim his share of the national sporting consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with this: Hershiser’s record is one of the sport’s more impressive, and in a season that’s been dominated largely by codgers like Barry Bonds, Tom Glavine, and Craig Biggio chasing achievements of longevity, it’s good to see someone at the height of his powers chasing a mark that could only be set by a great player in his prime. It’s just a mild shame that Webb, a wonderfully entertaining pitcher, hasn’t been paid more attention before this. He deserves it.

Webb, like Hershiser (and like Don Drysdale, whose record scoreless streak Hershiser broke), is a master sinkerballer; batters hit two-thirds of the Webb pitches on which they manage to make contact on the ground. The sight of a pure sinkerballer like Webb, the Dodgers’ Derek Lowe, or the Yankees’ Chien-Ming Wang at the top of his game is one of the most entertaining spectacles baseball offers, mainly because the batter invariably knows exactly what pitch will be thrown and where it will be located, and yet finds himself utterly hopeless to do anything about it. He can’t not offer at the pitch, because it will be called a strike; he can’t offer at it, because if he hits it, the heavy, natural downward motion will leave him pounding it into the grass helplessly and being marked off as a 6–3 on the scorecard.

Whether Webb breaks Hershiser’s record or not, he’s always worth going out of your way to see, simply because he’s more likely than anyone else in the game to pitch a game in which every batter is reduced to swatting at balls he knows he can hit, and with which he knows he can do nothing. He’s especially worth watching now. There may be more elegant pitchers, more artful pitchers, and more dominant pitchers, but Webb does something special, putting hitters in a batter’s box similar to the one they find themselves in against Mariano Rivera, in which foreknowledge does them no good whatsoever. This is perhaps the purest expression of a sport that revolves around frustration. Long live Brandon Webb!

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Jeff Conine, acquired by the Mets yesterday in exchange for two minor leaguers with little chance of haunting Omar Minaya in future years, is a professional hitter, through and through. The only question is what, exactly, this means. I believe it means that he’s well respected and not very good. He’s capable of recognizing what he’s supposed to do in all situations and only rarely capable of doing it. He will probably not harm the Mets; he will certainly not help them; if the team wins the World Series, Mets fans will, for years to come, look at pictures of the team triumphantly spilling out onto the field and ask, bewildered, if Jeff Conine was really on that team, and if so, why. After thinking it over, they will tell themselves that he was, after all, a thoroughly professional hitter. Somewhere, Conine will polish his third ring.

tmarchman@nysun.com