There haven’t been a lot of cheery storylines for Major League Baseball heading into tomorrow’s All-Star Game. After a season dominated by the depressing, you might expect MLB viewership to be down.

A suddenly flat Barry Bonds is months away from breaking baseball’s all-time home runs record, and defending National League MVP Albert Pujols has been hurt. Top pitcher Roger Clemens took a three-month holiday, and steroid headlines continue to dominate baseball coverage.

Yet baseball’s biggest national carrier, ESPN, has seen huge viewership increases this year compared with last. ESPN’s 52 games through last month have averaged 1.4 million total viewers, up 15 percent over 1.13 million at this time last year. Eighteen games on ESPN2 have averaged 923,000, up 21 percent over last year’s 764,000, according to figures given by the network to Variety.

Some credit certainly goes to changes in restrictions on which teams ESPN can show. The network is now allowed to show teams four times per year on the weekly “Sunday Night Baseball” instead of three. That means that the Red Sox and Yankees, for example, can be featured once more than last year, thus drawing more viewers.

Also, as part of their most recent deal, MLB and ESPN agreed that in their first two weekday appearances on the network, teams would not be blacked out in local markets in deference to regional carriage deals.

But some of the credit for the surge in ratings also goes to teams that have turned themselves from basement dwellers to contenders, from the New York Mets and Detroit Tigers to the Cincinnati Reds, though they are now fading. And of course there's the dominant Boston Red Sox.

Even those who aren’t fans of those teams tune in to see if their hot streaks will continue.

Detroit leads the AL Central with a record of 58-24 through Saturday night. Last year the Tigers lost 91 games and finished second-to-last in the division. A game with the Astros last month even set a record on FSN for the best-ever Tigers household rating, at over a 10.

Meanwhile, the New York Mets have had such a resurgence that regional coverage of the team outdrew the crosstown Yankees once this season. The Mets finished seven games behind Atlanta last year in the NL East; this year they lead the division by an astounding 12 games. And Cincinnati, which finished 27 games behind the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Central last year, was behind by just three through Saturday night despite cooling off from a hot early start.

Meanwhile, in other sports ratings for the week ended July 2, Fox’s Pepsi 400 NASCAR race ranked No. 1 with an average 5.1 household rating.

On cable, ESPN’s annual July 4 telecast of the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest was up 74 percent over last year, from 660,000 households to 1.15 million.