For these 5 teams, first 10 days of second half will be critical 

There’s always something fascinating going on in the world of baseball -- and there’s always something new. Every Friday morning throughout the season, heading into the weekend, inspired by *Zack Lowe’s terrific “10 Things I Like” NBA column for ESPN, we present the Five Fascinations, five fun things going on in the baseball world. Also, we’d like to shout out* the always excellent Ben Clemens at FanGraphs, another progenitor of a similar format. Submit your personal fascinations to will.leitch@mlb.com, or just yell at me about mine.

This week: As we head into the second half, we take a look at five teams for whom the next 10 days will be absolutely critical. Will they be buyers? Sellers? Holders? The next 10 days will make all the difference. Here are the five most fascinating teams at the moment.

1. Cubs
The Cubs could have made everything a lot simpler for themselves had they not played so well in the final 10 days of the first half. On the morning of July 4, they were nine games under .500 and 13 games out of first place in the NL Central, with a limping offense, injury issues (which would get worse when Cody Bellinger landed on the IL) and just a whole big batch of bad vibes. It didn’t look like they’d need to wrestle with a decision about 2024: It was about to be made for them.

But then they went 8-3 to close the first half, including a road sweep of the Orioles, and suddenly it’s complicated. They’re in last place in the NL Central, but only by a half-game, and they’re only 3 1/2 games out of the final NL Wild Card spot. The season has felt like a disappointment so far, but you’re always just one hot streak away. The four series before the July 30 Trade Deadline should be clarifying: six games at home against the D-backs and Brewers and six on the road against the Royals and Reds.

The Cubs look wounded. But they’ve also won eight of 11. That’s confusing. Clarity could, and should, be coming soon.

2. D-backs
Every team that is maybe dissatisfied with how it has played so far but is still within shouting distance of the playoff chase will be pointing to last year’s D-backs as a reason to go for it. That team won only 84 games and was outscored by 15 runs on the season, neither of which stopped it from getting hot at the exact right time and sprinting all the way to the World Series. You want a reason? The 2023 D-backs are a reason to believe.

But are the 2024 D-backs? On the plus side, they actually have a positive run differential, unlike last year’s team, and they’ve played better of late, thanks in large part to Corbin Carroll starting to look a little bit more like Corbin Carroll. On the minus side, most of their big free-agent signings, particularly the pitchers, have gone bust; they have the 26th-best ERA in baseball, ahead of only the White Sox, Angels, Marlins and Rockies. If they can play well in their next seven games, on the road against the Cubs and Royals, they’ve got a nice stretch with six home games against the Pirates and the Nationals. If they’re still over .500 at the end of that road trip, they’ll surely stay in this chase.

Even with all their troubles, they might be a better regular season team than they were last year. Not that that guarantees them anything.

3. Giants
Don’t listen to anything I have to say about how important the next 10 days are for the Giants. Listen to team president Farhan Zaidi, who said he’s waiting for “the team to tell us” whether they’ll be adding or subtracting talent over the next fortnight. The Giants were one of the most aggressive teams in baseball this offseason, but it hasn’t really paid off: They’re three games under .500, in fourth place in the NL West and three games out of a Wild Card spot. How in the world did this team win 107 games three years ago?

Of course, you don’t need to win 107 games to reach the postseason, and the Giants still have a bunch of talent, albeit talent that isn’t living up to its reputation right now. But they've got a largely favorable schedule leading up to the Deadline. They’ve got seven games with the Rockies and three games with the A’s … with, gulp, a four-game trip to Dodger Stadium smooshed in the middle.

The Giants have been uninspiring this year, and you can understand why their fans might be running out of patience with them. But that’s nothing a hot streak can’t fix. If they can merely split that series against the Dodgers, there are wins to be had otherwise. The Giants invested a lot in this season. Are they going to be ready to let that go?

4. Rays
The big question with the Rays: How much do they believe? This famously analytically driven front office -- not like they aren’t all analytically driven at this point, but you know what I mean -- hasn’t had to be sellers in quite a few years now. They’ve made the playoffs five straight seasons, after all. (And won 90 games in the year before the streak started.)

They’re at .500 now, which could give the impression that they might let this roll, but look under the hood a little, and you wonder whether the Rays’ luck is about to run out. They’ve been outscored by 63 runs -- that’s worse than the Nationals and almost as bad as the A’s -- and their pitching has been a mess. They’ve got some potentially juicy trade chips, from Zach Eflin to Randy Arozarena, and they’re in a division with very little wiggle room: FanGraphs gives them only 16.2 percent odds of making the postseason.

But 16.2 percent is not nothing, and it’s not like the Red Sox and Royals, the teams they’re chasing for the final AL Wild Card spot, are all that terrifying. Fortunately, the Rays have a very convenient series to start the second half: four games at Yankee Stadium. If they win three out of four there, or even more, it’ll be hard to justify any sort of sell-off, particularly with games against the Blue Jays, Reds and Marlins coming up. But if the Yankees -- who of course are under their own sort of pressure right now -- knock around the Rays, their path may become clear.

5. Reds
Want a below-the-radar, stealth, hipster pick to make a playoff run? How about the Reds? Sure, they’re three games under .500 and eight games out of first in the NL Central, as well as three games back in the Wild Card with a whole bunch of teams ahead of them. But this is a young, exciting team that has been bashing the baseball lately and is more than capable of continuing to do so. Rece Hinds has been a blast of energy, another young player in a lineup loaded with them. The Reds only have one regular over 30 (Jeimer Candelario), and three under 24, including Hinds. Nick Lodolo’s return boosts the rotation, and, honestly, who would be surprised if Elly De La Cruz just went white-hot for two months and carried this team? (And made a last-minute MVP run at Shohei Ohtani?)

It's not like anyone else in the NL Central is all that terrifying, no? People have been waiting for the Reds’ young talent to coalesce, and there were signs at the end of the first half that it might be doing so. They’re undeniably the most exciting team in the NL Central; it would be awfully fun to see them make a run.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that they start the second half with a nine-game road trip to Washington, Atlanta and Tampa Bay. If that goes wrong, it’ll be difficult to justify the Reds making any addition, as far back as they’ll be in the standings at that point. But then again, a little faith might be just what this team needs.

Fun Series of the Weekend: Astros at Mariners
The Astros have won six of the last seven AL West titles -- the only one they didn’t was in the truncated 2020 season -- but they haven’t spent a single day in first place this season. Win two out of three in Seattle -- or just win the first game of this series -- and they’ll be right back where we’re used to seeing them.

Meanwhile, the Mariners, who had a 10-game lead only a month ago, are trying to win their first AL West title since 2001 … and can’t be feeling great about the Astros being this close to chasing the down already. But the Seattle crowd is going to be hopping, and Julio Rodríguez is warming up. It’s going to feel like October in the Pacific Northwest all weekend.