Oakland A's 2017 Community Prospect List intro: Nominations before our first vote!

Welcome to the beginning of our 2017 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 nomination process (we’ll add in the full voting process next time when we have a ballot to vote on):

• In the comments, you may nominate a player to be put onto the ballot for the next round.
• The format for the comment should be "Nomination: Player Name".
• 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. (In this case, we’re taking the top five nominees.)

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 in the comments with some of the biggest options, but here are a few resources to help you remember all the available names. First, some crucial links:

• 2016 CPL end-of-season update — This is your one-stop shop for everything, including the 2016 list, a full stats table for 45 players, info on who everyone is and whether their stock went up or down last year, and my own personal A’s prospect list (from Nov. 18, so there have been some slight tweaks to my list since then).
• Athletics Nation’s Prospect Watch series — This is a collection of all our reporting on Oakland’s system from throughout the year.
• MLB Pipeline A’s Top 30 list — From MLB.com, this list includes excellent scouting reports for 30 of the team’s top prospects. This list represents a 2016 midseason update, and will be re-released later in the offseason.
• Baseball America A’s Top 10 list — This is more current, having been released Nov. 28.
• John Sickels A’s Top 20 list — From SB Nation’s own Minor League Ball, this one includes grades (on an A-to-F scale) and was just released today.

Next up, here is the current depth chart, from the MLB team down through Rookie League. A few notes about the methodology (or if you don’t care, then just scroll down and see the chart):

• The top section is supposed to be the 25-man roster, but I’ve only got 19 guys up there for now. Those are the established MLB guys. Directly below them, you’ll find everyone else who has at least debuted in MLB but is still fighting for a spot on the big club.
• Players below the cutline who have an asterisk* are on the 40-man roster.
• Players in bold are my personal Top 13 prospects (plus Mengden, who graduated).
• Many of the minor leaguers got late-season promotions. For the most part, I listed them at the level they moved up to, especially if my impression is that they’ll stick there to begin 2017. There will be others who move up next spring, but these particular ones already did so.

Alright, now you know the names. Make your nominations in the comments!