The All-Star break has always been considered the midpoint of the baseball season, but the fact is that every team has played more than half of its games a week earlier. A more accurate marker of the midpoint of the Major League Baseball season would be July 4.

Here alone in 2016, every team has played at least 83 games, with most hitting 90 before the All-Star break. Two clubs, the Toronto Blue Jays and the San Francisco Giants, have already played 85 games. By next Tuesday’s Midsummer Classic at San Diego’s Petco Park, both teams will have completed nearly 60 percent of their seasons.

The Fourth might be a better indication of the midway point of the season, but it provides a very inaccurate picture of which teams will be champions of their divisions. Rarely do teams in first place on Independence Day end up there at the end of the season.

In the past five seasons, only nine division champions have held the top spot on July 4. The other twenty-one division champions were looking at at least one other team at the midway point, and some were even as low as fourth place.

In 2012, none of the teams in first place in the Fourth managed to win their division. Even more incredible, four of the eventual division champions (Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland and Baltimore) were in third place at the halfway point that season.

The change at the bottom happens less often, but still more than half of the teams in last place on July 4th end up in the basement at the end of the season. Of the thirty clubs that placed last on the Fourth of July over the past five seasons, seventeen have ended up moving up at least one rung in their divisions.

For three of those seasons, exactly half couldn’t get out of the basement. But just two seasons ago, the bottom six at the midpoint finished ahead of at least one club in their divisions.

Chances are, the clubs that are at the top on July 4 are likely to be replaced at the end of the season. That fact should change the way clubs have traditionally viewed the baseball schedule.

Instead of waiting until the All-Star break in mid-July, teams’ front offices should start preparing for the second half at least a week in advance. The teams in first place right now have less of a chance of finishing on top than one of the teams currently chasing them, a scary thought for GMs who have so far considered 2016 a successful season.