The Inevitable, Perpetual Willie McCovey Memorial Community Prospect List Returns!

It’s that time of year once again. Time for us all to engage in our favorite holiday tradition — arguing over the exact ranking of the San Francisco Giants slightly — or perhaps significantly — improved farm system! As you may recall from last year, we’ve renamed the list the “Willie McCovey Memorial Community Prospect List”, in memory of the late great Giant (the childhood idol of one of our scribes). The list has always honored McCovey in spirit (and in length), as does the name of this website, and we both felt it was appropriate to make the honor direct and official last year.

So, a quick reminder about how the polls will work this year.

• We will start on Thursday, Dec. 12th (that’s tomorrow!), with the poll for this year’s number 1 prospect.
• New polls will be posted at 7 am PST every weekday (with brief pauses for the holiday dates). Votes will be tallied whenever Kevin or Roger see them before posting the next poll.
• Only one vote per user is allowed.
• All players who are still rookie eligible are eligible for this poll. This means batters who have 130 or less at-bats in the Majors, and pitchers who have 50 or less innings pitched in the Majors, or players who have spent fewer 45 days on the active roster (that means pre-September) in previous seasons. This may (if you, the community, so chooses) include minor league free agents the Giants have signed this offseason, as well as whoever tomorrow’s Rule 5 draft may bring on board.
• We will select 44 prospects for the list, honoring the jersey number of our namesake.
• Nominations will be handled as before: When we have just four players** left in a poll, we will call for nominations under the first comment. We may name players, but everyone is invited to name someone. Vote by clicking the ‘rec’ under the comment. You can vote for as many players to be nominated as you wish. The four nominees with the most votes will be added to the poll.
• Ties in voting will be broken by a runoff. If two players tie, the winner of the tiebreaker will get the spot, the loser will get the next spot. If three or more players tie, then only the winner will get a spot on the list, and the losers will be returned to the poll.
• When names are listed for the polls, the First Name will link to the player’s Baseball-Reference page, the Last Name links to the player’s Fangraphs page (if applicable). We also encourage voters to campaign for their favorite choices in the comments. Favoritism by all voters is encouraged, except by Roger and Kevin (which means Tyler Rogers, once again, will NOT be the #1 prospect, but he WILL be on the list somewhere we’re guessing).
• We will have a Storystream that will hold the polls, to easily track past days, see past arguments and how the votes have been tallied.

**We DO have one change for this year. Instead of taking nominations for the opening poll, we will begin our process with the three defacto top prospects of the system — Joey Bart, Marco Luciano, and Heliot Ramos — and let you choose among them for the top spots. During the 2nd poll (Friday, December 13), we will open the floor for our first nominations and then proceed as usual the rest of the way.

And so — Are you ready? Who is Number 1? Who is Number 2? Who will take our traditional “Favorite Name” spot? Which reliever will inexplicably be boosted up to the upper tier of the rankings? Will we ever have another crazy Mikey Edie phenomenon (yes, Roger pleads guilty to that)? We shall see!

If you need to bone up a bit, here’s the Giants’ 2020 Prospect List on Fangraphs while the Baseball Prospectus’ list promises to be out in about a week and even Baseball America may get their Giants’ top 10 published before New Year’s.

Stick with us the rest of the off season to see who makes the list. By the time we’re done Pitchers and Catchers will be reporting and the scent of freshly mown grass will be on the wind and we’ll be off!