You can see it everywhere.

Gary Bettman’s busy polishing up the Stanley Cup and trying to book himself a flight to Tampa Bay on Priceline with the $18 the NHL made this season; the NBA (thank God) is about to stop polluting TVs at bars around campus; the weather is bearable … well … occasionally.

Summer is almost here.

And baseball season is hitting full swing.

Every year around this time, there are a couple MLB teams that start to show signs (not always in the standings) that they might just be for real, and a couple teams that start to show signs (rarely in the standings) that they aren’t.

Here are four teams that can win it all come October, and four more that can’t:

St. Louis (13-13): If there’s one thing that recent history has taught us, it’s that the old adage “pitching wins championships” isn’t only obnoxious; it’s also fairly inaccurate. Other than the Diamondbacks winning the World Series in 2001 — and even that team had just two great pitchers — there hasn’t been a team since the 1995 Braves that relied more on established pitchers than it did on established hitters. The Marlins last season relied on pitchers stepping up to do things in postseason play that they had never done before, ditto to the Angels in 2002. The Yankees essentially founded their entire theory of success on this premise.

But there is one important thing that every team that has won it all recently has had in common: a solid core of clutch hitters and clutch defenders. The Cards have this in spades. Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, Jim Edmonds, Ray Lankford, Reggie Sanders and Edgar Renteria (who had already racked up one championship-winning RBI at the tender age of 23) all have the ability to make important plays in important situations — both at the plate and in the field.

Whether the pitching can come up big when it really matters is yet to be seen. Woody Williams and Matt Morris have both looked solid in the shots they’ve had at the postseason, but Jason Marquis, Jeff Suppan, Chris Carpenter and minor-leaguer Adam Wainwright are all unknown commodities. If even one of them decides to step up, it’ll be tough to beat the Cards in October.

New York (AL) (14-11): For all the talking people have done about the Yankees, it seems that in an era when dream teams like the Lakers and the Red Wings keep finding ways to lose, people have lost sight of the fact that this team isn’t just great (like the past couple of Yankee squads), it’s probably the best we’ve ever seen. There simply isn’t a single reason that the Yankees should lose any game this season.

There’s a lot of pressure that comes with this, of course, and, added to the already high-pressure atmosphere of playing in Gotham with Steinbrenner’s wandering eye always vigilant, that pressure may just break a couple of Yanks before the season’s through. But even if it does, there are about 50 potential replacements on teams like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Cincinnati just waiting for their GM to come up and give them the good news.

Kansas City (8-16): The Royals have exactly the make-up of a team that can make a surprise run come October: a mastermind coach who everybody loves, a talented young rotation, a flame-throwing closer, a young superstar (who happens to be in a contract year), and a couple aging stars dying for a chance at a World Series ring. They’re tailor-made for a Cinderella run.

The only problem is that they aren’t really winning yet. Everything seems to have gone wrong in Royal country so far this season. Jeremy Affeldt, Brian Anderson and Darrell May were supposed to anchor the rotation; each of them has instead been horrible. Everyone from Mike MacDougal to May to Angel Berroa keeps getting hurt, Juan Gonzalez’s swing is a mess and Benny Santiago, it turns out, really is as old as he looks.

The one positive for Kansas City is that they play in a division where — as the Twinkies proved last year — being down doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out. Minnesota and Chicago are both decent teams, but neither of them is going to run away with the division title. As long as the Royals can make some sort of a late-season charge and make it into the postseason, they’ll be a perfect underdog to take down some giants.

Anaheim (16-10): A lot of people predicted that the Angels were going to be good this season, but not many realized just how quickly this patchwork team was going to click. Vladimir Guerrero, Bartolo Colon, Jose Guillen and Kelvim Escobar are all playing like they’ve been on the team for years — coming up with clutch hits, solid starts and big plays in the field.

But that’s not the reason the Angels will be so dangerous in October — that’s the reason they’ll make it to October. The reason Anaheim has a valid shot at another World Series ring is the same reason it won its first one: the most stifling bullpen in baseball. After something approximating a sophomore slump last season, K-Rod appears to be better than ever in his third season. He has pitched 14 innings so far and has yet to give up a run while striking out 20. K-Rod is also on pace to shatter the record for holds in a season (a fairly worthless record, but the best a middle reliever can hope for).

Troy Percival is shutting the door on games as effectively as ever, and Kevin Gregg is providing valuable innings. When Brendan Donnelly comes back from injury, the Angels’ pen will have an unprecedented ability to essentially end games in the sixth inning.

With the offense in place, if they are allowed to do that in October, the Angels may just be the best team around.

On the flip side, here are four teams that, in spite of all positive predictions, aren’t going anywhere:

Boston (15-10): I won’t go too into depth about the Sox, because — truth be told — I really like this team. Manny’s swing, Pedro’s competitive fire, Johnny’s beard and Wake’s knuckler are some of the best things about baseball. There’s not really any reason that Boston shouldn’t get to win a World Series.

But they won’t; that’s just how curses work.

Chicago (NL) (15-10): Unlike Boston, I don’t buy that there’s any mystical curse hanging over the Cubs. Last season’s painful ending (even as a Cards fan, it was a bit painful to see that) — with a jackass Cubs fan losing a chance at the championship for his team — wasn’t so much a curse catching up with the Cubbies as it was a circle of bad karma earned by the team’s beer-throwing, trash-talking, self-entitled, idiot fans coming to kick the team in the ass.

That said; the Cubs are done with bad karma for now. A team can only pay for having bad fans for so long.

But that doesn’t mean that the Cubs are anywhere close to good enough to win anything this season. The lineup and the bullpen are mediocre and the team’s supposed strength, the rotation, is sketchy at best until Mark Prior comes back (and who knows whether he’ll really come back or how much his injuries will affect him when he does). Kerry Wood is an erratic head-case, who — as strikeout pitchers tend to do — for some reason has inspired people to think he’s far better than his past proves he is. He has never won more than 14 games in a season, has a career ERA of 3.62 and has allowed batters to get on base against him nearly a third of the time in his career.

None of this will matter if Wood can step up come clutch time for the Cubbies. But it’s hard to ignore that in the NLCS last season he compiled a 7.30 ERA and allowed 21 baserunners in just 12 innings. Not exactly clutch.

San Francisco (12-14): No one has ever come close to doing the things Barry Bonds is doing so far this season. Unfortunately for the Giants, unless another hitter can step up and make a case that it’s not worth pitching around Bonds every time he comes to the plate, his most impressive achievement this season will be cracking not only the 200 walk barrier, but also the 300 walk barrier (he currently is on pace for 274; the record, which Bonds already owns, is 198).

The Giants play in an awful division and may be able to sneak into the playoffs on that predication, but they don’t have anywhere close to enough talent to go any further.

Oakland (12-13): The A’s are quickly turning into the Braves of 10 years ago. The pitching is fantastic — no one will disagree with that — and probably will be enough to propel the team into the playoffs yet again. But the A’s just don’t have the punch to get it done in the playoffs. They’re no better this year than they were last year, and they were no better last year than they were two years ago.

The only significant upgrade the A’s have made to their team is in the pitching rotation, which now goes five deep instead of three deep. But how much does having five starters help a team that only needs three to win a postseason series?