If there’s one piece of received wisdom about this season that doesn’t make any sense, it’s that the National League East, a division in which every team is above .500, is somehow weak. This impression is largely the result of the teams behind the Braves being bunched so closely together. Entering play last night, only two games separated the second-place Nationals from the last-place Mets, which presents the image of an undifferentiated swamp of mediocrity.

Won-loss records within divisions aren’t a zero sum game, though, which is why this canard is such a peculiar one. The National League West has not a single team, not even the division-leading Padres, at .500. Might the strong records of the East just be the mirror image of those in the West?

As is turns out, this is probably the case. The East is, collectively, 49-31 against the West, 74-64 against the Central, and 41-37 against the American League in interleague play.

This being so, it’s hard to understand how any coherent case can be made for the East being especially weak. What looks like weakness is actually just a byproduct of these teams beating each other up. Every team, except for the Mets, who were 29-30 against extradivisonal competition going into last night’s game, has a winning record outside the East; almost certainly, any one of these five teams would be far out in front in the West and at worst neck-and-neck with the Astros for the wild card lead were they playing in the Central.

This odd circumstance is one good reason among many to oppose the ridiculously unbalanced schedule. For decades, the integrity of baseball’s standings couldn’t be questioned, simply because every team was playing the exact same schedule. No one can argue that one team is substantially better than another if both have earned the same record playing the exact same slate of games.

With scheduling arranged the way it is now, though, that argument is easy to make. The Cubs and Mets were both 53-52 going into last night’s action, for example; the Cubs, though, had played 20 games against the Pirates and Reds, the two worst teams in the Central, and had gone 13-7 in those games.

The Mets, meanwhile, had played 24 games against the two teams in the East with the worst records excepting their own, the Marlins and Phillies, and had gone 15-9 in those games – a slightly lesser record against inarguably tougher competition.

What would the Mets’ record be if they had played those 24 games against the woeful Reds and Pirates? Who knows? The question is in the realm of abstract metaphysics, which should be reserved for Kant and college football rather than baseball.

The most compelling argument for the strength of the East, though, can be made by applying simple common sense. Probably the weakest team in the division is Washington; the one with the worst record is the Mets. Both are good teams – not mediocre, but outright good. Either, I suspect, would have won 60 or so games playing in the NL West.

Washington has Nick Johnson, who’s leading the league in on-base average; Chad Cordero, the best closer in baseball this year; and, in Livan Hernandez, John Patterson, and Esteban Loaiza, three of the 10 or 15 better starting pitchers in the league. The Mets have Pedro Martinez, a surprisingly solid pair of starters behind him in Kris Benson and Victor Zambrano, and two-thirds of a rather scary lineup in David Wright, Cliff Floyd, Mike Cameron, Jose Reyes, Mike Piazza, and Carlos Beltran. Go through all the mediocre teams in history,and you won’t find many that have the league’s on-base leader and best reliever.

Rather than looking for reasons to think all these teams are unimpressive, it would probably be better to appreciate the sheer amount of talent gathered on the eastern seaboard right now. In the history of divisional play, only once has an entire division come in at .500 or above – the 1991 AL West. That league was much like this one – one division, the East, had a notably unimpressive collection of teams. It was also similar in that pretty much every team in the West was good or better.

The worst team in the ’91 West, the Angels, had three 18-game winners, two star hitters in Wally Joyner and Dave Winfield, and Bryan Harvey, the best closer in the league. Among their competitors were the Twins, who won the World Series; the White Sox, an excellent young club; an Oakland team on the downside of its mini-dynasty; and several other teams with good things going for them.

Should the worst team in the East this year win one more game than those Angels, this will be the first division composed entirely of winning teams – something all the more impressive given that they’re all playing each other 19 times.

Firsts in baseball, I’ve always thought, were to be celebrated, not dismissed.