Mike Celizic

Two months into the 2007 season, it looked as if this was going to turn into one of the duller seasons in recent history. With just more than 50 games played, teams were already stretching out division leads and only four teams in all of baseball were even as close as five games to the leaders.

So now there are six weeks and just fewer than 50 games left, and we’re right back where we’ve been at this date ever since baseball made its modest effort to inject a shot of parity into the game.

Detroit and Cleveland were tied for the AL Central. Seven teams were within five games of division leads and two more were within six games. That’s 16 out of 30 teams with legitimate shots at eight playoff spots.

Let this be a lesson to us for future seasons. Baseball is still a game of haves and have-nots, but revenue sharing and the luxury tax have spread the money out and a new emphasis on developing home-grown talent has made this the most competitive era in memory. So no matter how seasons start and how lost some teams look early in the season, only fools and columnists can pretend to know in June that anything’s going to be locked up as September begins to loom.

The only thing we should know is that come stretch time, there are going to be a lot of contenders and not much to separate them all from each other. So fasten your seat belts, stow your tray tables and make sure your seat back is in the full upright and locked position. The final approach to the playoffs is just beginning.

The attention, as it so often is, has been focused on the New York Yankees’ charge at the Boston Red Sox, a race that is starting to look like 2005, when New York was five games out on Aug. 13 and ended up winning the AL East by a game as Boston took the wild card.

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But the Yankees are hardly the only surprise. St. Louis and the Chicago Cubs, who were six and eight games, respectively, under .500 on June 1, are both in contention in the NL Central. Neither is exactly tearing it up — the Cubs were three games over the break-even point and the Cards were still five games under, but the Milwaukee Brewers, who looked so strong, had played one game under .500 for 2 1/2 months, throwing the division up for grabs.

In the NL West, Arizona has somehow managed to build a three-game lead over San Diego, while the Los Angeles Dodgers, who led the division on June 1, have fallen six games back and are in danger of losing contact. And in the NL East, the New York Mets continue to lead, but they’ve been unable to build any kind of cushion over the Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves, both of whom refuse to go away. The Phils are the big surprise. On June 1, they were floundering and had already fallen 8 1/2 games back; on Monday morning, they were just three back, a half-game ahead of the third-place Braves.

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