Rankings/List

The last pitch of the 2015 Major League Baseball season was thrown a month-and-a-half ago. It's been all offseason since then and a busy one at that.

But there's still plenty left to do.

This hot-stove season features one of the deepest classes of free agents in history and a trade market that's been plenty active. That's why there's a seemingly endless supply of available players, which naturally makes the process of sorting them all out rather difficult.

The 2015 MLB offseason has been a major bummer for Chris Davis and Yoenis Cespedes.

The winter meetings are fading into the background and those free-agent mashers are still hunting for that lucrative, and to this point, elusive, payday.

Finding logical trade destinations for notorious underachievers like Hanley Ramirez and Matt Kemp is no enviable task.

Once upon a time, Ramirez and Kemp were mashing together in the heart of the order for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now, those guys headline the list of potential trade chips playing on bloated superstar contracts.

This year’s winter meetings, while not nearly the whirlwind of blockbuster activity they were last year, gave us plenty to chew on through the new year.

A few notable teams have been clear offseason winners through this past week, and a few others have been virtually shut out despite carrying high expectations into the meetings. That is part of the reason there is so much left to dissect as the hot-stove season enters what could be a cool period before teams pick up their activity after Christmas.

The 2015 MLB winter meetings have come and gone, and plenty of notable moves have already changed the landscape of MLB. 

Now that the winter meetings are behind us, we have a better sense of the trade market and which players could potentially be moved before the beginning of the 2016 season. Over the next few slides, we'll try to predict where each of the top 15 trade targets will eventually wind up. 

With the MLB Winter Meetings coming to an end Thursday, it's time we look at those who had a good week in Nashville, Tennessee, and which teams will benefit the most this upcoming season.

The list comes with this disclaimer:

We can't definitively project success over the long-term. The Zack Greinke to the Arizona Diamondbacks-type deal has proven time and time again that monster contracts for guys in their 30s don't always pan out in the end. Who knows how good the Greinke deal will be in 2021, when the 32-year-old is in the last year of his contract?

After this week's winter meetings and all that came before, there are now fewer players available on the offseason market than there was when the offseason started. Alas, it's withering away.

But it's not empty yet, folks. And we can prove it!

We're going to do that by ranking the top 25 targets that still available on the free-agent and trade markets. The former is straightforward. For the latter, be warned that we're only looking at players who have been mentioned in serious rumors recently.

The transaction wire was flooded in the days leading into this week’s Major League Baseball winter meetings, and it did not stop over the first two days in Nashville, Tennessee. 

But by the time Day 4 concluded Thursday, the final official day of the meetings was mostly uneventful and much of the wire activity consisted of minor or mid-level moves. Still, all can be significant to the teams involved even if the signings and trades don’t necessarily move the needle.

The Rule 5 draft was held Thursday, and several players swapped organizations because of it. Over the next few slides, we'll take a look at each pick's chances of sticking on his new team's big league roster. 

The winter meetings always provide a good deal of excitement around the MLB community, and this year has been no different.

While the meetings won't officially wrap up until sometime Thursday afternoon following the Rule 5 draft, there have been enough trades and free-agent signings that it's worth taking an updated look at where things stand around the league.