Fast start puts Tigers in playoff contention Some teams are already looking to next year

All this rain and we’re already a quarter of the way through the major league baseball season. Talk about short summers.

At the quarter pole, some notes. Tampa Bay, Minnesota, and K.C. are looking to next year. Ouch. Baltimore is heading that way along with Cleveland.

Minnesota is the biggest surprise in that group. The hoped-for pitching has been a disaster.

Detroit is amazing and it is about pitching. They are holding pace with the most wins in the majors on any given day. If they played the rest of the season at .500, they would win 88 games. That is getting mighty close to a postseason spot.

The Tigers’ big problem is they play in the same division as the World Champion Chicago White Sox. With the West Division teams seemingly heading into a year where they all play .500, the wild card could come down to Boston, New York, Toronto, and the Tigers.

The National League West is another .500 division and should stay up for grabs. That gives the Colorado Rockies a chance to make the postseason for only the second time in their history. San Diego should be the best team in the West but has shown no desire to run with it.

Washington, Florida, and Pittsburgh are gone and no one is surprised. The Nationals now begin the task of building with new ownership approved this week by MLB. Florida continues to look for a place to play with the Florida legislature voting down any money for a new stadium. Pittsburgh continues to be a Triple-A team in the majors.

There was no reason to believe at the beginning of the year that the Sox and Yankees could put much distance between themselves this season. There is no reason to believe otherwise now.

The Yankee starters are in trouble, none more so than Randy Johnson, who is just lost. “I can’t remember the last time I pitched a good game,” he said last week. The worst part for him is he doesn’t know what the problem is.

The Sox have the advantage there with Curt Shilling and Josh Beckett. Better yet, the Sox year may turn on the return of a backup catcher named Doug Mirabelli. He makes knuckleballer Tim Wakefield effective and that could spell the difference in a tight race in the East.

Finally, the Bonds story is old. No one believes he didn’t knowingly use steroids. His home runs are silent shots into dark nights without honor. Sad, but for Bonds, who says he stopped “playing” the game a long time ago and now just works, he feigns disinterest in the tempest around him.

There is reportedly added misery for his Giants in this Bonds saga.

I was told this week that Bonds will receive $4 million a year for the first four years he is out of the game due to a contract that had back-end payments. Worse for the Giants, said the source, they may have to actually try to sign him again in order to keep people coming into the park.

And with that, we and MLB head into the hopefully drier days of summer.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.