Has it been a terrific baseball season … or a clunker of major proportions? Page 2's Jonah Keri and Eric Neel have wildly different spins on this question. We've placed all sharp objects safely out of reach, and it's time to open the floor for debate.

Counterpoint
• Eric Neel: A clunker of a season

Jonah Keri: A Season for the Ages

If you can't get excited for this baseball season, well … you're just not trying. I could list a couple hundred reasons why this has been one of the best seasons in a long time. Lucky for you, Eric, our editor has us on a strict word count. So here are just a few of the great stories from 2007:

• The Natural, twice: Josh Hamilton goes from No. 1 overall pick eight years ago to washed out of baseball due to drug and injury problems to spring training phenomenon to home run machine as a 26-year-old rookie. Grown men shed tears, and Hollywood is already planning a movie.

Then it happens again! Rick Ankiel comes up as the best pitching prospect in baseball as a 20-year-old, loses his confidence so badly that he can't stop throwing the ball to the backstop, nearly ends his career, then comes back as a power-hitting right fielder. Now he's one of the leading men on a Cardinals team that could be on the verge of a miracle comeback. You'll never see two such unlikely stories in the same season again. Ever.

• Barry Bonds breaks the all-time home run record: Love Barry or hate him, you couldn't turn away. We had the intrigue surrounding whether Hank Aaron and Bud Selig would show up for the record-breaking homer, the swirling accusations of steroid use, the pitchers who went all-out to avoid being the guy in the record book. When Bonds finally broke the record, you either cheered him or you booed him. But one way or another, you cared.

• Wild pennant races: We're a week away from September, and every playoff spot is completely up for grabs. More than half the teams in baseball have a realistic shot of playing into October. Everyone else can play spoiler.

• Surprise teams: The Diamondbacks were a chic sleeper team in some circles -- but not many people pegged them for the best record in the NL, or for Brandon Webb to take a run at Orel Hershiser's almost unbreakable scoreless innings streak. The Indians went from 78 wins last season to leading the AL Central with five weeks left to play. And how 'bout those Mariners? They started off well, but when they lost seven in a row last month, everyone thought they were done. They've gone 18-7 since, Ichiro's an MVP candidate and people are going nuts for baseball again in the Pacific Northwest.

• The Return of Harvey's Wallbangers: Sure they're not as dominant as the '82 Brew Crew. But these Brewers are still in the thick of the playoff race, with a chance to make the playoffs for the first time in 25 years. Prince Fielder is an MVP candidate, while Ryan Braun is a shoo-in for Rookie of the Year and an inspiration to boychicks everywhere.

• Sweet Lou's Cubbies: Their record isn't that pretty, but they're in first place. Lest you scoff, remember what the 83-win Cardinals did last year. Could this be the end of the Cubs' 99-year World Series drought?

• A-Rod: All he did was have the best April in major league history. He's cooled off a bit since, but he's still been amazing. He's smacked his 500th career home run and is on his way to a possible 50-homer, 150-RBI season.

• Yankees/Red Sox: The Red Sox have the best record in the game, but people are still freaking out in Boston, because the Yankees have shaved a 14½-game lead down to five. They face each other six more teams this season, including three in the Bronx next week. Bucky Dent good-luck charms/effigies are selling like hotcakes.

• The next generation of great shortstops: The NL is overflowing with young stars at short. Jose Reyes could be the next 100-stolen-base man, Jimmy Rollins and J.J. Hardy have turned into sluggers, and Hanley Ramirez just might be the best player in baseball.

• The Mets: A potent lineup led by two young stars in Jose Reyes and David Wright. A great starting rotation with two 20-somethings (John Maine and Ollie Perez) and a 60-something (El Duque). A team well-armed for a run at the World Series. Somewhere, Doc and Darryl are watching.

• Curtis Granderson: Having a huge breakout season as the Tigers try to get back to the playoffs, Granderson has 19 triples. That gives him a good shot at 26, which would tie the second-highest total since 1900 (the record is 36 by Chief Wilson in 1912).

• Player blogs: Granderson has one. So does Curt Schilling. Pat Neshek will trade baseball cards with you on his. Not since Dodgers players walked back to their houses in the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods after a game have fans been able to interact so closely with players.

• The small-ball Angels: They're next-to-last in the AL in homers, and maybe only Vlad keeps you up at night. But this year's team looks a lot like the 2002 World Series team: strong starting pitching, a lineup full of high-average pests, tons of speed and a shut-down bullpen. They might be setting baseball back 40 years, but they're in first place while they do it.

• Thirty runs: The Rangers scored more runs in one game than any team had in 110 years. A skinny utility infielder whacked two homers, a farmhand just called up from the minors smoked a grand slam and the hits never stopped coming. What, not enough action for your tastes?

But hey, if you'd rather watch full-contact tiddledywinks, no one's stopping you.

Eric Neel: A clunker of a season

I'm no coldhearted cynic. I know there have been moments this season.

Rick Ankiel's going yard in his Busch debut as an outfielder -- a beautiful thing, no doubt. Josh Hamilton's beating back the demons -- truly heartwarming. Santana's 17, Jenks' 41, Webb's 42, and Anderson's 10 were all very cool, and A-Rod's April (and every other month, too) was most excellent.

But highlights notwithstanding, the 2007 major league season has been undistinguished at best, and at its worst, downright ignominious.

• Barry Bonds sets the all-time home run record with a classic blast in front of his home crowd. But the chase is cheerless and shadowed by suspicion and the absence of Bonds' jailed friend and confidant, Greg Anderson. People in the stands and in the press box fall all over themselves to say how ambivalent, how appalled and how utterly uninspired they are by the accomplishment, and commissioner Selig issues tepid, implicitly judgmental statements about it, as if to suggest he and his office bear no responsibility at all for the flowering of the steroid era.

Here's a moment that should have been celebrated but couldn't be, a moment that should have felt momentous but instead felt muted and embarrassing for everyone involved.

You can't separate the moment from what it wasn't, and you can't get it back. You can't separate the moment from the season in which it took place, and you can't distance everything else from the pall it cast.

• On the surface the Diamondbacks look like a scrappy band of kids who have come together to contend for a division crown. Then you look closer, see a paper champion's run differential as well as a truly anemic batting average (28th of 30 big league teams) and on-base percentage (29th), and you want to turn away.

• The powerful young Brewers are locked in mortal combat with the perennially snakebitten Cubs and defending champion Cardinals, which would be interesting if the Brew Crew hadn't made like Wile E. Coyote plunging down a cliff face with an anvil in his hand (16-22 since the All-Star break) to get there.

• The AL East gives us a thrilling late-summer charge by a dead-and-buried underdog. The only problem is that the cape-wearing Lazarus is no dog at all, but the vaunted Yankees, once again tussling with the Red Sox while the rest of the division sits on the sidelines. Yawn.

• Astros rookie Hunter Pence puts together a dazzling couple of months, seemingly cruising toward the Rookie of the Year award and some nearly unprecedented first-season numbers, only to be derailed by a wrist sprain. In fact, the injury bug stings itself an All-Star team, including Chris Carpenter, Chase Utley, B.J. Ryan, Joel Zumaya, Joe Mauer, Bartolo Colon and Ben Sheets. And several elite-level mashers, including Big Papi, Albert Pujols, Jason Bay and Travis Hafner, ostensibly nursing barking muscles and tendons and whatnot, fall way off their typical numbers.

Nick Laham/Getty Images

The talented Hanley Ramirez toils largely in obscurity in Florida.

• The two best offensive players in the NL this season, as rated by Baseball Prospectus -- Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera -- play for a Florida Marlins team that is 14 games under .500. One of the most exciting players in the AL, B.J. Upton (.308/.391/.522), toils in Tampa obscurity. Outside of fantasy baseball circles, nobody cares even a little about these guys. I mention this because on the clubs in the hunt, after A-Rod, Prince Fielder, Jose Reyes and Magglio Ordonez, there's a decided lack of make-you-want-to-tune-in studs. Check the Padres roster. Or the Mariners. And many of the stars who are in the title chase (see Vlad Guerrero, Ryan Howard, David Wright) are having solid but unspectacular seasons.

After the Bonds stuff, and everything this year is "after the Bonds stuff," none of it is terrible, but none of it is great, either. No high drama, no cream at the top.

The season so far shapes up as utterly forgettable.

Everything's almost but not quite …

• The Rockies almost get Todd Helton a well-deserved sniff of a playoff race, but then tail off.

• Daisuke Matsuzaka shows flashes but never dominates.

• The Dodgers and Padres are neck and neck at the break, and then L.A. forgets how to score runs.

• C.C. Sabathia is great, except when he's bad (21 hits and 13 runs surrendered in two starts in early July), and Jeremy Bonderman is just OK, except when he's horrid (28 earned runs and 40 hits in his last five starts).

So I'm waiting. Holding out hope. Maybe the rush is yet to come. Maybe somebody is about to go on an epic tear (maybe that somebody is Mark Teixeira, and maybe it will inspire more genius songwriting from these two). Maybe the Red Sox and Yankees will duel a duel so brutal and nasty and thrilling as to make me not care that it's the Sox and Yankees all over again. Maybe Brandon Webb will kick off a new consecutive scoreless innings streak and then out-Hershiser Hershiser in a glorious, improbable, how-do-they-do-it-with-so-few-runs D-backs' run to a World Series title.

I hope that's how it goes. I want something unforgettable in these last few weeks.

I need something to make me forget the first few months…

Jonah Keri is a regular contributor to Page 2 and the editor and co-author of "Baseball Between the Numbers." You can contact him here.

Eric Neel is a columnist for Page 2. You can contact him here.