Starting Thursday in San Francisco, tune in to see which dwindling wild-card contender will prove it’s not as bad as the other!

The Giants, jeez, are now 20-35 since the All-Star break, after the paltry Padres swept them this week — in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the maddening, Maddon-quarreling Cardinals have lost three of their past four games, and in those three, they totaled just seven hits.

And at least one of these teams is a playoff team.

I still think it will be the Birds. The Giants are a mess, even if they’re still believin’, or as their ads say, citing their success in 2010, 2012 and 2014 – “beli-EVEN.”

But this is a peculiar September for St. Louis — trying to find reasons to be optimistic about your Cardinals, even though your Cardinals are still right in the wild-card mix.

Here’s some veiled optimism: The Cards were probably going to lose to Kyle Hendricks (2.03 ERA) and Jon Lester (2.40 ERA) anyway, so does it matter that they only conjured four hits on those two combined?

Keep in mind that the last time two Cubs finished first and second in ERA was 1938.