Oakland A’s 2018 Community Prospect List intro: Nominations before our first vote!

Welcome to the beginning of our 2018 Oakland A’s Community Prospect List! We’ve been creating our CPL via crowdsource vote for the past decade, 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):

• I will start with a comment calling for nominations. Make your nominations as replies to that initial comment. Please don’t reply further to the nomination comments, so they can all stay together at the top of the thread.
• 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 his comment. The player with the most Rec’s earns the nomination. (In this case, we’re taking the top five vote-getters.)

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:

• 2017 CPL review/update — This is your one-stop shop for everything, including the 2017 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 (and grover’s!).
• 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 2017 midseason update, and will be re-released later in the offseason.
• Baseball Prospectus A’s Top 10 list — This is more current, having been released Dec. 1. (Baseball America has theirs scheduled for Jan. 17.)
• 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 released Dec. 20.

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 pared down into a sample 25-man roster. Directly below them, you’ll find everyone else who has at least debuted in MLB. Players below the cutline who have an asterisk* are on the 40-man roster.
• Think of this as a snapshot of the end of 2017, plus offseason moves. Minor leaguers are listed at the level where they finished last season. Many of them will move up to begin 2018, but we’ll have to wait to see which ones.
• At the Rookie League level, I only included a few key names rather than the whole roster.
• Players in bold are my personal Top 25 prospects.
• Players in italics with a caret^ are coming off major injuries or still mid-recovery.
• Players in italics with an ampersand& are out of minor league options.

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