Mike Celizic

It’s going to be a great second half to the 2008 baseball season. Just how good it will be is up to the teams fighting for playoff spots. But the possibilities for great races in both leagues and every division are there as seldom — if ever — before.

With half the season left to play, 26 of the 30 major league teams were within 10 games of first place. Two more were within 11; one was just a half game further back at 11.5. Only the Mariners, 17.5 games back in the AL West, can truly be said to be utterly and completely dead in the water.

A 10-game deficit looks like a big gap to bridge, and it is. But it’s hardly beyond the imagination of even a person duller than the menu in a Honduran prison. You improve by a mere half-dozen games and the guys you’re chasing get five games worse, and the gap is gone. It’s been done before — with some frequency. Just last year, the Yankees were 10.5 back and won the wild card, Philly overcame a five-game deficit at the midpoint, the Cubs made up 6.5 games to overhaul the Brewers, and the Rockies charged into the playoffs from eight games in arrears.

That simple arithmetic makes this potentially one of the best summers baseball has seen in a long time. At the mid-season last year, 18 teams — eight fewer than this year — were within 10 games of first, and one of the teams that was 10.5 back — the Yankees — actually made the playoffs.

In 2005 and 2006, there were 19 teams within 10 games of first, and in 2004, the number was 21 — a large number, but still five short of this year.

This is beyond extraordinary, and it’s more than parity at work. The truth is, there isn’t that much salary equality in the game, not when the Marlins are spending a 10th of what the Yankees spend yet are closer to first place than the Yankees.

Instead, it’s a testament to how well the poor teams are developing talent through their farm systems. It’s also a measure of how closely a new breed of baseball executive has listened to the moneyball theories as showcased so well by Billy Beane in Oakland, where the impecunious A’s are again in the hunt, just 4.5 games behind the Angels.

A lot has been made of the fact that the team formerly known as the Devils Rays is giving the Red Sox a run for their $138-million payroll this deep into the season. But that’s not the only interesting race in the game.

In the NL East, the Cubs have been cruising along for a couple of months now, but after dumping three in a row to the White Sox, they’re just 2.5 ahead of the Cardinals, who weren’t supposed to be anywhere near a pennant race. And the Brewers are showing they weren’t a mirage last year, but are indeed a young team on the rise.

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