Mike Celizic

Just over three months ago, we began this journey the way we always do, by telling ourselves that everything is possible, even a season of fewer than 100 losses for the Washington Nationals.

We had some pretty good ideas about which teams were going to dominate and which weren’t, but the great thing about baseball is that the game always surprises you. Teams that are supposed to be great sometimes fail. Teams that are supposed to be mediocre sometimes triumph.

So we sit back and wait for trends to develop, for teams to show on the field what couldn’t be seen on paper, telling ourselves that we’ll start thinking seriously about who the real contenders are once the All-Star break arrives.

It’s like the end of one season — real-life fantasy baseball when Kansas City and Baltimore can briefly flirt with success and the Mariners can lead the fleet in the AL West — and the beginning of another. The one that counts.

It’s like shutting down a zoom lens from a wide-angle view that includes everything to a tighter focus that cuts out the clutter around the edges of the picture and picks out the things that really matter. The first half of the season was fun. The second half is war.

As we’ve been seeing with increasing regularity as some sort of parity descends on the game, it’s a war with a lot of participants and multiple fronts. In the NL East and NL Central, only the Nats can be said to truly be without hope. They’re already 22.5 games back and ready to make a run at the 1962 Mets’ seemingly unassailable record of 120 losses. They’ve already got 61 against just 26 wins, but they’ll have to slow down even that snail’s pace to out-lose the Amazins’.

Pittsburgh is 9.5 games out in the Central, and normally, you’d say that anyone within 10 games of the leader has a shot. But the Pirates are jettisoning players and doing everything they can to stay at the bottom of the division. For them, it’s familiar territory.

Nobody else in either the East or the Central — Florida, Atlanta, New York, Milwaukee, Houston, Chicago and Cincinnati — is more the 6.5 games behind division leaders Philadelphia and St. Louis. And nobody except the Phillies, Marlins, Cards and Brewers are playing above .500.

It may be a war of mediocrity in those two divisions, but as we’ve seen before, you can have very exciting races when nobody knows how to string together more than a few wins in a row.

The surprises in the two divisions are the Mets and the Cubs. The Cubs are contending as a .500 team only because no one else is much better in the Central, not even St. Louis with Albert Pujols. The Mets are just 6.5 games behind Philly despite a 42-45 record only because the Phillies recently decided to play baseball as if they meant to.

The NL West, on the other hand, is showing strength it hasn’t had in a long time. The Dodgers amazed everyone in the first half by rolling out to a big lead despite the absence of Manny Being a Dopehead Ramirez, and they continue to enjoy the best record in the game, winning at a .636 pace, which would give them 103 wins should they continue it. But the Giants, carried by Tim Lincecum and a pitching staff that has been the stingiest in baseball, are seven games back and leading the NL wild-card race.

So you want something exciting to watch in the second half, there it is: The ancient rivals, Dodgers and Giants, tearing and clawing at each other from now until the end of September.

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