Opinion

Now that the trade deadline and its accompanying madness have come and gone, it's time for Major League Baseball's stretch run to whittle its playoff races down to 10 final teams.

Time will be the final judge on that. But since time takes, well, time, let's entertain ourselves by calling the shots.

While you were feverishly following trade rumors ahead of Monday's non-waiver deadline and digesting the moves your club did (or didn't) make, another week of baseball action receded in the rearview.

Luckily for you, at Bleacher Report's MLB Team of the Week headquarters, we've been paying attention. 

You know the drill: Here are 10 players—one per position, including a designated hitter and a starting pitcher—who busted box scores over the past seven days.

If you're a fan of star-studded Major League Baseball free-agent classes, I come bearing bad news. There's not going to be one this winter. Sorry.

But hey, at least Edwin Encarnacion will be out there. That's something. A big something, even.

It's not easy to take Justin Turner seriously as a star player. He used to be an anonymous New York Mets utility guy. He's now a Los Angeles Dodger not named Clayton Kershaw, Adrian Gonzalez or Corey Seager.

The AL Central race had been feeling like a foregone conclusion. The Cleveland Indians took hold of first place in early June and held a lead of at least five games every day between June 25 and July 26.

But now here to crash the proverbial party are the Detroit Tigers.

Sean Conroy's trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame last November wasn't his first. His hometown of Clifton Park is roughly 70 miles from Cooperstown, so he'd seen the exhibits about baseball's immortals.

But it's different when you go to gaze at your own.

Yasiel Puig is a good baseball player.

With all the acrimony and controversy swirling around the Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder, it's easy to lose sight of that fact. But it's a fact, nonetheless.

And yet, it's been a while since results were consistently there for Puig.

Trading places, trading stories, trading, trading, trading….reactions, thoughts and takeaways…

1. Sacred Moment, Sacred Teams

Maybe the Chicago Cubs break their 108-year World Series-less drought this year, maybe they don't. But in picking up closer Aroldis Chapman, the Cubs boldly made the move they needed to make to give this team an even better chance to win.

This changes everything.

That might as well be the official motto of MLB's annual non-waiver trade deadline, which rolls around every summer to tilt the balance of power and upend playoff races across both leagues.

The 2016 edition was no exception, with an array of marquee players swapping uniforms and the postseason picture shifting accordingly.

The 2016 MLB non-waiver trade deadline has officially passed. You may now exhale.

It won't go down as the most earth-shattering deadline of all time, particularly considering the lack of marquee starting pitchers that changed hands.

Still, we saw plenty of landscape-altering deals, with the Texas Rangers loading up on bats and a late-inning bullpen arm, the New York Yankees shifting into unfamiliar sell mode and the New York Mets netting a slugger for the second straight year, among many other machinations.