PHILADELPHIA – The Milwaukee Brewers brass sounds confident in Dustin May as a playoff starter.

Dustin May, on the other hand, isn't instilling a similar assurance.

After taking the mound on three days’ rest Sept.

22 at Citizens Bank park in hopes of finding something – anything – to get him back on track in a planned abbreviated outing, May allowed two runs on a home run to Brandon Marsh to mar the evening.

May was back to square zero afterward – struggling, frustrating and searching.

“I’m just going to do what I’m told at this point,” May said when asked what comes next.

“I don’t feel like I’ve pitched my way into having a say in anything.

I’m just going to do what they tell me.” Those are not the words of a pitcher brimming with confidence.

It’s far from it.

Nearly all of May’s postgame interviews have been strung together by a similar tone, too.

He’s made it through five innings in only two of nine starts and has a 5.61 earned run average since the Brewers traded a hefty haul of prospects Alex Frias and Josiah Ragsdale for him from St.

Louis at the deadline.

His strikeouts are down, his walks are up and so is his hard contact allowed.

What’s holding him back, exactly? It doesn’t seem to be the stuff, which is on track with where it’s been all year.

Is it execution? Is it the pitch mix and sequencing? Getting on page with a new team? “None of that,” May said.

“It’s just results based.

The stuff’s the same as it was before.

I just got to get outs more efficiently.” And what needs to change in order for that to happen? “I don’t know." May not be defeated, but he is certainly dented.

This is why he pushed to take the ball just four days removed from his last outing, a six-hit, three-run showing over only 2 ⅓ innings at Baltimore on Sept.

“We want to give him as many outings as we can,” manager Pat Murphy said.

“It’s still a chance to go back out there and pitch.

Kind of solidify how he wants to do things.

We all got to get on the same page.” The Brewers like the way all of May’s fastballs function independently.

Collectively, though, constant barrage of fastballs has allowed hitters to gear up for velocity.

May has thrown his triumvirate of fastballs 72% of the time with the Brewers, up from 66.8% as a Cardinal this year.

Even his cutter, which has been an excellent swing-and-miss pitch, has been hit because it doesn’t have enough of a velocity gap from his sinker and four-seamer.

There may be a world in which that could work for May, but that world also features an effective breaking ball.

That’s just not somewhere he is living right now.

Ordinally, a right-hander pitcher like May could rely on his sweeper to offset this.

Not May,....