Preview/Prediction

Matt Williams is just one of an array of managers who should be brushing up their resumes as the 2015 MLB season hits the home stretch.

We're heading down the final stretch of the 2015 season, and there are plenty of intriguing storylines left to play out. Each of the 30 teams is in a different place in terms of competitiveness, but all have something to play for over the last quarter of the baseball year.

There is still a lot of baseball to be played between now and the offseason, but it's never too early to look ahead at what promises to be an exciting winter around the league.

This year's free-agent class will be headlined by a trio of legitimate aces in David Price, Johnny Cueto and Jordan Zimmermann. On the offensive side of things, Justin Upton, Chris Davis, Jason Heyward and Yoenis Cespedes highlight the top position players on the market.

With that in mind, what follows is an early free-agency preview for all 30 teams.

Two American League teams that sit atop the wild-card standings will battle for playoff positioning when the Toronto Blue Jays start a three-game series against the Los Angeles Angels on Friday in Anaheim.

With under 50 games left in the MLB regular season, roughly half (or more) of teams are within striking distance of the division or one of the wild-card spots.

In particular, four playoff races seem to be the tightest at the moment: AL East, AL Wild Card, AL West and the NL West.

This year's MLB rookie class may not feature an immediate superstar like Mike Trout or Jose Abreu in recent seasons, but in terms of depth, it's as good as any in recent memory.

September baseball is right around the corner, and several teams still have excellent opportunities to make a playoff run. However, not all teams will be as lucky, and some recent slumps by the Washington Nationals, Minnesota Twins and Tampa Bay Rays might be too much to overcome.

Only a handful of games separate teams vying for wild-card spots, and most of those teams play each other at least one more time the rest of the way. Look for the teams with the most consistencies slowly begin to make a move to the top.

With less than two weeks to go before baseball's trade season officially comes to an end, contenders are beginning to scramble to add whatever reinforcements they can before making their final playoff pushes.

That hasn't necessarily been reflected in the rumor mill, which has maintained its speed over the past week, but we can be sure that general managers are feverishly working the phones. Some are trying to work out deals for players they've claimed on waivers, while others are focused on players who have already passed through waivers unclaimed.

The line "if the season ended today" gets thrown around a lot at this point in the MLB season, but the truth is there is still a lot of baseball to be played.

At roughly the same juncture in the season last year (115 games played), the Milwaukee Brewers still led the NL Central standings and the Toronto Blue Jays would have grabbed the No. 2 AL wild-card spot over the Kansas City Royals.

The Toronto Blue Jays are the hottest team in baseball, and they've used an 11-game winning streak to vault themselves into the role of 4-1 favorites to win the World Series at sportsbooks monitored by Odds Shark.