Week Ahead: Pennant races percolate

The first Trade Deadline is in the books. The second one is almost a month away. So instead of spending most of our non-baseball-game-watching hours wondering where the Hot Stove smoke might lead us, we’re back to staring at the standings once again.

Naturally, as the week ahead dawns and the season steams close to the midpoint of August, pennant races are heating up. It helps to get the good vibes going now, because we’ve seen year in and year out that some mojo in these dog days of summer can carry all the way into deep October.

Take the Cubs. The darlings of early 2016 stumbled onto some trying times in midseason, but they never gave up their hammerlock on the National League Central’s top spot, and they enter the next seven days on another Windy City winning streak.

The Cubs have won seven consecutive games, have extended their MLB-best record to 69-41 and enter a week full of home games, with two Interleague matchups against the struggling Angels on Tuesday and Wednesday and a renewal of their legendary rivalry with the second-place Cardinals with a Thursday-to-Sunday set.

“We’re just playing baseball and having a good time doing it,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said. “It’s great, and we want to keep playing good baseball.”

That will be a similar theme throughout the ballparks of the American and National Leagues this week, particularly atop divisions that are way more tightly contested. The AL Central and AL East, for example, are set up for serious late-summer drama, and crunch time begins now.

The Indians still lead the AL Central, but the Tigers have cut that advantage to two games. This week, both teams have …

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