Opinion

The 2016 season has not gone according to script for the Los Angeles Dodgers. On Sunday afternoon, though, all the punch-up artists in Hollywood couldn't have written it any better.

When Jose Fernandez pitched, anything was possible. He was young, vibrant, dominant and passionate.

He was a Rookie of the Year winner, surely a future Cy Young Award winner, a foundational piece of the Miami Marlins organization and a face of the game's next generation.

That he died overnight Saturday is stunningly tragic.

That it was in a boating accident is utterly unspeakable.

The Washington Nationals are your 2016 NL East champions, having clinched the division Saturday night. Their only worry right now is how much champagne stings when it gets in their eyes.

So, it's up to us to worry about their path through the National League playoffs.

It was easy to like the Toronto Blue Jays last September. They made the deals of the summer. For the final two months of the regular season, all they did was win.

They had David Price, they had a lineup that didn’t stop, they had a boost from Marcus Stroman’s return and they had whatever momentum you get from going 21-6 in August and 18-9 in September.

There's a saying in baseball: "A team never wants to lead the league in meetings."

The implication being that when a club holds a meeting, it's almost universally to discuss what is going wrong and how to repair it. But teams rarely find themselves where the Chicago Cubs stand, having already clinched the NL Central and preparing for the playoffs.

The marathon MLB season has been reduced to a sprint. For the clubs still in the hunt, every game matters—a lot.

For Bleacher Report's MLB Team of the Week, on the other hand, all that matters is the recent past.

Here are 10 players—one per position, including a pitcher and designated hitter—who've busted box scores over the past seven days.

To qualify, a player needs to have made at least two starts at the position in question, or one start in the case of pitchers.

If the season ended Thursday, the Detroit Tigers would own the American League's second wild-card slot.

And they'd be one dangerous wild card.

Baseball doesn't get much better than this. With just over a week left in the MLB regular season, we have 12 teams within five games of a playoff berth—and a three-way tie in the National League wild-card race.

Tell us again how baseball is boring, haters.

For most of those teams, their destinies are in their own hands. Or rather, in the hands of their biggest X-factors, players who can change the course of a game—and the way the playoff race shakes out—with a single swing or pitch.

There's a New York Yankees coach named Tony Pena. He was an All-Star catcher when he played in the major leagues, the only All-Star catcher ever born in the Dominican Republic.

When you ask him why there's only been one, he first says, "Don't ask me that question." Then he points across the Yankees clubhouse, at the corner where 23-year-old Gary Sanchez is sitting in front of his locker.

"There's one coming up," he says.

As the National League continues to leave no doubt about who its World Series favorite is, the American League may finally be settling on one of its own.

The Boston Red Sox.