As July nears, it is the moral duty of everyone with any interest in baseball to speculate on all sorts of possible deals. Whether coming from a plugged-in national reporter passing on front office gossip or a WFAN caller who wants to trade Marlon Anderson for Erik Bedard, though, what these speculations usually omit is context, which is really what matters most.

It’s impossible to talk baseball these days without Cleveland ace and pending free agent C.C. Sabathia coming up, for instance. The defending Cy Young Award winner has a 2.14 ERA over his last 12 starts, during which he’s averaged 7.1 innings a game, putting to rest any fears brought on by a miserable April, and with his team 35-41 — 6 1/2 games behind Chicago in the American League Central and 9 1/2 behind Tampa Bay in the AL wild card race — trade rumors make a certain amount of sense.

What this misses, though, is that the Indians are hardly out of it. Their actual record may be the most important bit of information about them, but the second-most important is their run differential. Having outscored opponents by 15 runs, the Indians have, to date, played much better than their record. If anything, they should be picking up players for the second half, because with a bit of improvement and a bit of luck, they should be right in the thick of the race.

One way to apply this logic more broadly, and so create a context for fevered trade speculation, would be to divide each league into four classes. One class would comprise teams such as the Red Sox, the White Sox, the Rays, and the Yankees, who both have good records and have outscored their opponents. Another would comprise teams such as the Mariners and the Royals, who are just flat lousy. And two more would be for teams that either have run differentials better than their records, or records better than their run differentials.

If you think about this, it’s easy to order teams within this framework. The AL team with the most incentive to improve would be the the first-place Los Angeles Angels, who were 46-30 despite having only outscored their foes by 13 runs going into last night’s play. They’ve banked more wins than they should have, in an abstract sense, and if they don’t improve, gravity will start to work on them. (Baltimore and Texas were also outperforming their run differentials, but face less urgent need for improvement, given that neither has great odds of making the playoffs because they play in tough divisions.)

After Los Angeles would be their divisional rivals, Oakland, who were 4 1/2 games out pending last night’s results. Having outscored their opponents by 63 runs, second in the league behind Boston, the A’s are well-poised to make a real run at the pennant and could benefit from any gains they make over the next few weeks. Cleveland is in a similar, if less dramatic, position. Like these two teams, Toronto, Detroit, and Minnesota are played a bit better than their record, but Toronto is mired behind at least three clearly superior teams in their own division, and Detroit and Minnesota are basically .500 teams in a division with two other tough competitors; both are as likely to end up sellers as buyers by the July 31 trade deadline.

All of this being so, you still can’t expect teams to always act in their own interest. Los Angeles could easily improve just by bringing in outfielders to replace veterans Garret Anderson and Gary Matthews Jr., both of whom are hitting like bench players, but because both players are well paid, that’s not likely to happen. And given Detroit’s $130 million payroll, it’s a good bet they’ll look to add parts rather than throwing in the towel, no matter what their odds are.

Oakland, conversely, can easily improve by picking up a decent first baseman (theirs have hit .245 AVG/.333 OBA/.365 SLG) and right fielder (.227/.274/368), and because they’ve been playing prospects and cheap veterans at both positions, and because they have a loaded farm system, it’s easy to imagine them doing so. Cleveland, similarly, has been getting exceptionally weak production from its corner outfield slots, manned by players in whom the team has no great investment, and there’s no reason to expect they won’t pluck some low-hanging fruit.

In all, entertaining as it is to blue-sky some possible scenarios, the best thing to do is assume that teams are not run by complete idiots, and to assume that these non-idiots have a decent grasp of how good their teams have been, what their needs are, and how they can improve. Sabathia is almost certainly not going to fill a hole in the New York rotation, and Oakland is quite unlikely to trade oft-injured ace Rich Harden. On the other hand, Seattle has some awfully tempting players who are as available as they could possibly be. That’s at least true of the many bad teams in the National League, to which we’ll turn our attention tomorrow.

tmarchman@nysun.com