Mike Celizic

The AL East is the Himalaya mountain range of baseball. It’s not that the range contains all the mountains in the world, just the biggest, baddest, most forbidding and scary ones.

If you’re looking for the best teams in baseball, you start with the AL East. You could go on from there, but why bother? Texas may have ridden a winning streak to the second-best record in baseball, but the Rangers aren’t fooling the analysts. Look at almost any reputable power ranking and the top three teams in the game are all in the AL East — the Yankees, Rays and Red Sox.

Their winning percentages, respectively, are .625, .597 and .589. No team in the National League is winning at a higher rate than any of the AL East’s Big Three, and only Texas, with a .611 percentage is playing up to AL East standards, but it’s easier for Texas to do that because it plays in the wimpy AL West.

This lopsided situation is both good and bad. It’s good because a lot of fans are seeing a lot of great baseball in the East; even the Blue Jays are winning at a .534 clip. It’s bad because one of these three teams could win 95 or more games this year — that’s the pace Boston is on — and still not make the playoffs. It’s possible that the third-best team in the AL East will end the year with more wins than every team outside their division and still not make the playoffs.

Most analysts will say that’s tough luck, but if you want to make the playoffs in the East, you’ll just have to win more games.

The problem there is that as easy to comprehend as that advice is, it’s impossible to follow. There simply is no way the Baltimore Orioles or the Blue Jays are going to win the East except once every 30 or 40 years when the planets line up perfectly, the Yanks and Boston are ravaged by injuries, and the Rays go back to the middle of the pack.

So other analysts will say that since baseball isn’t going to impose a hard salary cap to keep the Yankees and Red Sox in check, the only solution is to break up the AL East. I’m not sure how you do that, but if a team like Toronto or Baltimore could just weasel its way into the AL Central or the NL anywhere, they’d be talking about winning instead of whimpering about how unfair life is to have stuck them in the most powerful and wealthy division in the game.

As with most of the world’s ills, you can blame the Yankees for this state of affairs. When they started to return to power in the mid 1990s, the AL was a nicely balanced league. The Indians were the monster team. The Royals were still just 10 years from their glory days. The Blue Jays won back-to-back world titles. The Orioles were powerful. Life was good.

Slideshow   The Week in Sports Pictures The Giants on top of the football world, getting ready for the London Olympics and more. more photos

But when the Yankees emerged from their 18-year slumber, they changed the rules. Now, to win, you had to spend tons of money. That was fine in Boston, where there’s plenty of money to spend, but not anywhere else.

The Rays coped the same way the A’s and Twins have: they drafted wisely and built a young team that could win for a few years before they would have to be dismantled as their stars became free agents. The Orioles tried to match the Yankees in spending, but didn’t match it with intelligent management. The Blue Jays have built a fine young team, but it’s on its way to a fourth-place finish, and it’s impossible to see a way for the Blue Jays to get back to the playoffs with the Red Sox and Yankees in the way.

In other divisions, there isn’t the same pressure because you don’t have to beat one of the two richest teams in the game just to win a wild card. There have been years in the NL West where the first team to break .500 won the division. And NL West fans wonder why nobody out there can win a World Series.

The NL East is tough, too, with New York and Philadelphia’s wallets doing battle with Atlanta’s intelligent management. But it’s not as tough as the AL East.

Nothing is as tough as the AL East, where the Yankees have forced their division mates to push the limits of their ingenuity and finances just to hope for a shot at finishing second, where teams that win 95 games can find themselves being called losers.

Also on NBCSports.com Beyond the Arc: No. 11 Mich. St. takes big step forward Chandler: Jeremy Lin was special even in 8th grade What NFC teams need this offseason  |  And AFC DeMarco: Dodgers could become a contender Follow us on Twitter: @NBCSports  |  And Facebook