Oakland A’s trivia: 1st-round draft picks

The 2020 MLB season is on hiatus, and there’s no telling when baseball might start again. In the meantime, let’s play some trivia!

The MLB draft is coming up on Wednesday, but it will be different than usual this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of the customary 40 rounds, there will be only five, with teams then free to sign some of the players who didn’t get selected. There will still be a 1st round, though, and the Oakland A’s will have the No. 26 overall pick.

The draft began in 1965, and the Kansas City A’s made the very first pick. Over the years since, the team has made dozens of 1st-round draft picks, with some panning out into stars, others into role players or journeymen, and still other never reaching the majors at all. Just as interesting is looking back afterward at which famous names aren’t on this list because they weren’t top picks.

The question today is, how many of the A’s 1st-round picks can you name? We’re including supplemental picks sandwiched between the 1st and 2nd rounds, as they tend to be referred to as 1st-rounders. However, we’re not including picks that didn’t sign with the A’s. I have constructed a quiz on the website Sporcle to test your knowledge, with the following instructions:

• You can go in any order, with 20 minutes and unlimited guesses to fill 76 spaces.
• You only need to type the last names to register the answers.
• However, you do have to spell them right!
• An asterisk next to the year denotes a supplemental pick (not necessarily the first pick of that year’s class).
• The number in parentheses after the year is the number that the player was picked in the overall draft.
• As an extra hint, the right-hand column shows the player’s career bWAR. Note that he didn’t necessarily accrue all (or any) of that WAR while playing for the A’s, just in MLB in general. (A value of “———” means he never reached the majors.)
• Read the next paragraph about how to not spoil the answers for everyone else in the comments section.

Share your results in the comments, BUT DON’T SPOIL ANYTHING!! There is an option in the comments for ”spoiler text,” which will black out that particular text until the reader puts their mouse over it to reveal it. If you are going to share right/wrong answers, please use the spoiler option. It’s on the row of options like bold, italics, etc., all the way on the right side, in between the option to add a hyperlink and the option to add a smiley face; it looks like a black square.

DON’T BE THAT PERSON WHO SPOILS THE ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS.

Alrighty, here is the quiz! It’s embedded below, or you can click here to play it on Sporcle’s site.

How did you do? Are there any that you can’t believe you missed?