Mike Celizic

If it weren’t for those damn Yankees, this would be a pretty good stretch run for Major League Baseball. A neck-and-neck battle in the AL West, a jam-packed NL East, scads of teams fighting for the wild cards, with no real favorite.

Instead, I find myself looking at the standings and the teams at the top of the eight playoff races and thinking that there isn’t a great team among them and hoping that no one asks me for a World Series pick, because there just isn’t a clear-cut favorite.

I could say the Cardinals, but they have some serious injury issues, and the memory of their collapse in last year’s World Series is too fresh to think of them as prohibitive favorites. There are the White Sox, but this is a team that just showed it can go a week without winning. Also, two of their starters are Jose Contreras, who was unable to pitch under pressure in New York, and El Duque Hernandez, who’s as crafty as they come, but who is also 86 years old. (Yeah, that’s an exaggeration. We all know he’s not a day over 52.) Besides, they’re the White Sox, who haven’t won a World Series since 1917, and when you’ve gone that long without a title, you can’t be a favorite to win any tournament.

You’ve got the Padres, doing their best — or worst — to win a division without winning even half their games. In the East, there are the Braves, the team you pick to win it all only if you enjoy being wrong.

The defending champs, the Red Sox, would be the obvious pick, but they’ve got less bullpen than the Yankees and not much more starting pitching. And the Angels should be the choice, but they just can’t light a fire under the imagination.

Even the wild-card race is tainted by the Yankees. They’re not supposed to be fighting to just slip into the playoffs. And they’re definitely not supposed to be worried about being passed by Oakland and Cleveland.

It’s guilt by association. If the Yankees aren’t great, then nobody else can be, either.

There’s shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. The NFL, with the recent exception of the New England Patriots, has been that way for a long time, and it’s made the regular season more exciting, not less.

Baseball is moving in the same direction, the dampers on team payrolls and the additional two playoff spots slowly leveling the playing field and bringing more teams into contention. This year is proof that the system has introduced the game to a new sort of competition, one in which there are no clear-cut favorites.

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