With less than six weeks left in a baseball season careening toward a climax somewhere outside of Pittsburgh, as ever, it's obviously a good time for some careful and even thoughtful analysis toward determining who will play in October and who will slink off in dejection, doomed to attempt to watch the playoffs (average game length: seven hours, 17 minutes).

Usually, this would start with a look at the contenders, their remaining schedules, their relative health, their team ERAs, their bullpen ERAs, their individual horoscopes, biorhythms, and general karmacology, all likely pointing toward a Game 7 in a World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Angels of Nearby Anaheim.

But why bother?

These division races are more likely to come down to who is and isn't in the mood to run out a groundball.

"Every run matters," Tampa Bay's B.J. Upton was saying the other day. "Every out matters."

Those would presumably include the two outs he has made in the past two weeks by jogging to first, and a third in which he was tagged from behind by the first baseman as he loped into second with what should have been a double. In the first two instances, Rays manager Joe Maddon yanked him from the lineup, but Maddon wasn't biting on the lope a dope thing, saying instead it was a mental error on Upton's part.

Upton's brain, presumably, somehow kept his body from shifting out of first gear. Bad brain. Mental error.

"It can't happen, especially in the middle of a pennant race," Upton said by way of apology. "It's just something that can't happen."

So how come it keeps happening, and not just with Upton?

Show me a contender, and I'll name you its notable loafer.

The Philadelphia Phillies?

Why it's none other than defending National League Most Valuable Player Jimmy Rollins. Pulled from the lineup by manager Charlie Manuel for his leisurely trot toward first base June 5, Rollins' egregious I'll-get-there-when-I-get-there posture barely got him to the ballpark on time six weeks later. He was benched for that day game against the New York Mets, whom the Phillies are now pursuing with growing desperation in the good ol' National League East.

The New York Mets?

Jose Reyes, ladies and gentleman. In parts acknowledged as the game's most exciting player, Reyes had been sent to the dugout for not running hard to first by former manager Willie Randolph. The night Jerry Manuel arrived as Randolph's successor, Reyes appeared to indicate an injury after another late arrival at first, and Manuel made him leave the game over the shortstop's strenuous objections.

The Los Angeles Dodgers?

Recipients of the most valuable and most fragile shipment from the trade market, Los Angeles now finds itself the sound stage for the clownish Manny Ramirez, late of the Boston Red Sox and always as good a threat to dog it as he is to flog it. No documented acts of offensive indifference have been catalogued yet, but they are coming. Manny might be a game-breaker, but he's further a heartbreaker. When baseball stat guru Bill James analyzed the 2003 Boston Red Sox, for example, he documented 53 "game-altering failures to hustle." Manny accounted for 29 of 'em, or 55 percent.

Even the crustiest managers expect a slight degree of abject laziness in today's game, even among players averaging $60,576.92 a week before taxes. Still, on evident groundball outs and popups, they expect players to at least achieve what has been referred to as "professional pace."

It's a shame, particularly in the case of the Rays, whose sorry history was the baseline for futility until this summer, that a franchise's first whack at a division title and postseason glory might be derailed by simple carelessness in the way its employees run.

"I can't make it any more plain, simple, obvious, black and white," Maddon told the Tampa media this week. "I can't have Aki [Iwamura] run like he is and [Carlos] Pena and Cliff [Floyd], who has two bad knees, etc., and permit [what Upton did]. I can't permit it."

Iwamura, praised in this context, himself failed to score the go-ahead run the eighth inning of a game last month. Asked how that happened, Maddon was forced to explain, "he just didn't run hard enough."

So I don't know how relevant it is that the Chicago White Sox, in an American League Central death struggle with the Minnesota Twins, have to visit Minnesota three times in the season's last week, or that Mets closer Billy Wagner might not be able to pitch again this season, or that Milwaukee's pitching might be the ultimate stretch-run x-factor.

With the way the fellas are jogging to first in even the most critical of situations, it might just come down to who doesn't want it more.