Herald-Times Readers' Preseason Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Herald-Times preseason baseball poll is, and how it differs from the paper's other ballots

Most reader ballots run by The Herald-Times ask readers to come back week after week. The sibling Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week resets on a rolling cycle through the sports year, and the paper's athlete of the year poll runs on the same rolling pattern. This page covers a different shape of ballot entirely: a single preseason baseball vote, opened ahead of the spring season, that asks readers to pick a player of the year before the season has produced a body of games to judge.

The program is the Herald-Times Readers' Preseason Baseball Player of the Year, run by The Herald-Times, an Indiana newspaper whose sports coverage lives at heraldtimesonline.com. The vote lives on the paper's poll.fm pages, which Crowdsignal hosts, at https://poll.fm/15277761. The format is a plain open ballot: the page lists the preseason nominees, a reader picks one and submits, and no entry form or nomination round sits in front of the vote.

Scope is the other contrast that matters. The Evansville Courier & Press football award and the Indiana SI awards answer to different publishers, while this baseball poll and the athlete of the week poll share the same masthead and the same platform. The table underneath gathers the fixed details.

The dated history of this baseball poll, and what the paper has not printed

The ballot history for this baseball poll rests on two years, 2022 and 2025. The 2025 ballot ran in April, opening and shutting within that single month, which places the vote squarely in the preseason stretch before Indiana high school baseball begins play. The program qualifies as annual, and a 2026 edition is the expectation.

The closed 2025 ballot published its result in full. The winning nominee finished with 56 percent of 1,826 votes, and the runner-up took 27 percent of 858 votes. Those are the only figures the ballot page prints, and they are the only figures repeated here.

What The Herald-Times has not published for this baseball poll is the exact day the window opens and the day it shuts, the full slate of preseason categories beyond the player of the year itself, and any per-reader voting limit or eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No promotion schedule for this baseball poll appears on the platform either, so no round dates exist beyond the April window. The gap between the 2022 and 2025 anchors also means the intervening springs are simply absent from the ballot history, and the page treats the two confirmed years as the whole of what is known.

How a supporter votes in the Herald-Times preseason baseball poll today

Voting in the Herald-Times Readers' Preseason Baseball Player of the Year happens entirely on the paper's poll.fm ballot. A reader opens https://poll.fm/15277761, reads the list of preseason baseball nominees printed there, selects a choice and submits the vote. The 2025 page showed each nominee with a school affiliation beside the name, so a reader could pick by player or by the school the player represents.

No login step is printed on the ballot, and no account screen sits between the nominee list and the vote. What the page does not print is a rule about repeat voting: the paper has published no per-reader limit for this baseball poll, and no daily return instruction appears anywhere on the ballot. A reader hoping to vote again on later polls in the paper's sports series should treat each ballot as its own event, because the preseason baseball vote closes at the end of its April window and the page then reads as closed.

After close, the same poll.fm address keeps displaying the result, with each nominee's percentage and raw vote total shown beside the name, exactly as the 2025 page does now. That makes the closed ballot a useful check on whether a new edition has gone live: a fresh open ballot replaces the closed result at the same address when the paper launches the next preseason vote.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

The Herald-Times baseball poll is the only preseason, single-sport player of the year vote in this set of Indiana ballots. Its closest relative on the same masthead is the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week, which covers every sport on a rolling weekly cycle rather than a single preseason question. Both live on the paper's poll.fm pages, so a reader who knows the weekly ballot already knows how this baseball vote behaves.

The other neighbours come from different publishers. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year belongs to a separate Evansville masthead. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week runs statewide across the fall sport. The Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 4A Player of the Year are Sports Illustrated branded awards split by classification.

Three things set the baseball poll apart from all of them: it is the only baseball ballot in the group, it is the only one timed to the preseason rather than the season itself, and it is the only reader vote whose confirmed history rests on the 2022 and 2025 editions with an April window. A supporter moving between these Indiana ballots should read each organizer's rules separately, since the publishers differ and their poll standards are not shared.

Strengthening support in a short-window preseason poll

The practical constraint in the Herald-Times preseason baseball poll is the calendar, not the ballot. The vote lives inside an April window ahead of the spring season, so a supporter has a short stretch in which sharing the poll.fm link actually counts. The most effective approach for this baseball ballot is to send the poll.fm address directly to people who already follow the player or the school, early in the window, and to name the poll in the share so recipients know what they are clicking.

The Herald-Times prints no rule about outside help for this baseball ballot, which means the honest position is that no published standard exists to point to. What is known is the shape of the vote: an open reader ballot on the paper's poll.fm page, a visible result with percentages and totals, and a closed page that keeps the final numbers on display. Support built on real shares fits that shape; a spike of unverifiable traffic does not, and the paper's closed result makes the final split public either way. For tactics that suit a short-window newspaper ballot generally, the how to get more votes online guide is the place to look.