Introducing the 2014 SB Nation MLB Awards

Greetings, Athletics Nation! With the World Series in the rear-view mirror, it's time for awards season to kick into gear. We're going to cover all of the traditional awards in the next couple weeks, but first we've got something a little special this month: the 2014 SB Nation MLB Awards.

There are six categories:

- Funniest moment
- Most regrettable moment
- Defensive play of the year
- Most important hit of the year
- Best pitching appearance of the year
- Team of the year

The first five are meant to focus on the Oakland Athletics themselves -- funniest A's moment, etc. The final one is meant to be our choice for Team of the Year among the 30 teams.

Here's how this will work:

1. I am going to open up nominations for each category in the comments, sort of like the annual Community Prospect List. I will post six comments to start things off, one for each category.

2. Reply to the corresponding comment with your nominations -- nominate as many things as you like, but please take the time to make sure your idea hasn't already been mentioned so that we avoid confusion and redundancy. Use a video or a GIF or a Vine or an image or just a really thorough description so that we know what moment you're talking about. Be liberal with your nominations; let's leave no stone unturned in this brainstorming thread.

3. As nominations roll in, vote for your choices by giving them a "rec." The top several vote-getters from each category will move on. Since this isn't the final vote, I suppose it's okay to vote for more than one thing from each category if you really want, though at some point you functionally cancel yourself out and render your votes meaningless if you choose everything. (Remember that there is an "unrec" button if a new nomination comes up after you've voted and you like the new one better.)

4. Over the next two weeks, each category will get its own front-page post with a poll that includes the top nominees from this intro post.

5. We will all vote on those polls to determine the winners for each category.

6. On Nov. 17, I will run a post of all of the winning moments (though if you're dying for the results you can always just follow the polls on each post).

7. With our winners selected, SB Nation's national MLB site will choose a few winning moments from around the network for one league-wide vote for the best moments of the year in all of baseball.

So, without further ado, let's get to it!