Oakland A's 2016 Community Prospect List intro: Nominations before our first vote!

Welcome to the beginning of our 2016 Oakland A's Community Prospect List! We've been creating our CPL via crowdsource vote for years, and it's time to get started on the next edition.

In this intro post, we'll simply be nominating players for our initial ballot, which we'll vote on next time. Here is the process (we're only doing the first two bullet points in this post):

• In the comments, commenters will nominate a player to be put onto the ballot for the next round. After the first nomination for a player has been put in, all other votes for that player will come from Rec'ing that comment. The player with the most Rec's earns the nomination.

• The format for the comment should be "Nomination: Player Name".

• Five nominees will appear on the ballot. The one who receives the most votes earns the next spot on the CPL, while the remaining four players move on to the next ballot where they are joined by the next nominee.

• If a prospect is traded, his name will be crossed out, and all other players will be moved up a space. If a prospect is acquired, a special vote will be put up to determine where that player should rank.

We will take the top five nominees in this post for our initial ballot. In the next post, we will vote on those five nominees to determine the No. 1 prospect, and then we will add one new nominee to the ballot for the next time, and so on.

So, who should you nominate? I'll get things started by nominating the top eight guys from the MLB.com Top 30 list, but below you'll find a few resources to help you remember all the available names. To learn more about each name, check out the StoryStream from last year's CPL, which includes my Prospect Watch series in which we followed the prospects' performances throughout the season. You can also check out the CPL Preview from Monday, which notes whether each prospect's stock went up or down from last winter.

The 2015 CPL:

Players in underlined italics have graduated to MLB and no longer qualify as prospects. Players in strikethrough are no longer in the organization. Remember that this list doesn't include any of last year's trade acquisitions or draft picks.

The other major preseason prospect lists:

The current depth chart, from the MLB team down through Rookie League. Players are listed at the highest level at which they played at least 5 games in 2015, and only the players below the cutoff (the line with the positions SP, RP, C, etc.) are eligible as prospects:

Make your nominations in the comments!