Rankings/List

The finish line is in sight for this Major League Baseball season. 

With less than six weeks to play in the regular season, very little is decided when it comes to the playoff races, sans the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals being locks to win their respective Central divisions. Everything else is still up for grabs. 

Don't worry, MLB contenders! Time may be running short, but there's still time to address your most pressing needs via the waiver trade market.

Up until August 31, MLB teams can still make moves with players who cleared waivers earlier this month. We've already seen Chase Utley, Marlon Byrd and Will Venable included in August deals involving contenders. 

Hunter Pence is the ultimate X-factor.

The dynamic right fielder is just the kind of game-changer who could vault the San Francisco Giants to yet another October run—that is, if his strained oblique allows him to fulfill that role.

Looking around the league, Pence is far from the only wild card who will have a dramatic impact on how the playoff chase shakes out. The idea here is to focus in on those players and storylines that will have a significant but unpredictable influence during the home stretch.

When you think about how many prospects who were considered to be among the best in baseball currently litter major league rosters, it'd be easy to believe that the minor leagues have taken a major hit, that there's not another wave of premier talent working its way through the system.

In some regard, you may be right. The 2015 season will long be remembered as the "Season of the Prospect," one that saw some of the best talent baseball has to offer make major league debuts.

Major League Baseball's August waiver trade period can be confusing, but teams can actually still add to and subtract from their current rosters until the August 31 cutoff date. 

With that deadline rapidly approaching, we'll take a look at the five best players who remain available on the trade market. 

The dog days of summer are here, and we have reached crunch time in the 2015 MLB season.

Getting hot at the right moment can go a long way in August and September, and even with so many games already in the books, teams continue to shuffle up and down in these rankings on a weekly basis.

So let's take an updated look at how all 30 clubs currently stack up.

When putting together this list, we considered the following factors:

There's a certain amount of risk involved in MLB with any free-agent signing or trade, as baseball is an unpredictable game and offseason additions don't always work out.

Whether it's a blockbuster trade or a big-money free-agent signing, there are always winners and losers, and the following article will focus on the latter.

Which players on the move this past offseason have struggled the most in 2015?

Slumps don't care how well-known a player may be or if he's appeared on our weekly All-Dud team before. They strike indiscriminately, usually without warning, and tend to stick around far longer than anyone wants them to.

They're like the guests you have over who can't take the hints you've been dropping all night that "hey, it's time for you to leave."

The days leading up to the revocable waiver trade deadline are nowhere near as busy or filled with rumors as the July non-waiver deadline, but this week there was plenty of activity to keep interest high.

From the San Diego Padres continuing to make weird decisions to the two front-runners in their division adding veteran pieces, trade talk had substance this week.

Mike Trout. Clayton Kershaw. Bryce Harper. Superstars always get more attention for their exploits and rightfully so.

But with the 25-man roster that MLB teams deploy, there can't be success without standout seasons from unheralded players. Over the next few slides, we'll identify the 10 most underrated players of the 2015 season.