The Courier & Press Orthopaedic Associates Preseason Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Courier & Press's preseason baseball ballot, and what its page actually confirms

Courier & Press runs the Orthopaedic Associates Preseason Baseball Player of the Year, a single-category fan vote for Indiana high school baseball, decided before that season's games rather than after them. The ballot lives on Crowdsignal, the polling platform behind the poll.fm short links newspapers use for reader votes, at poll.fm/16817285.

Nothing published narrows this to one city, school district, or conference; Courier & Press's own page speaks to Indiana preseason baseball broadly rather than a single town's roster, so this guide names the state and the organizer and stops there.

Two confirmed rounds four years apart, and a preseason ballot that already closed for 2026

Courier & Press's confirmed history for this ballot holds two rounds: 2022, and 2026. The 2026 round is the fuller one, its ballot dated to March, ahead of that season's actual baseball games, before the poll itself closed. Nothing published shows a round in 2023, 2024, or 2025, so this guide treats 2022 and 2026 as the settled history rather than assuming the gap between them hides a run that never actually happened.

What Courier & Press did not publish, even for the fuller 2026 round, was a category list beyond the single preseason ballot, a per-voter cap, or eligibility rules for who counts as a qualifying nominee. The next round's opening date, closing date, and any nomination window are not yet posted anywhere; confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than assuming a March timeline repeats automatically.

A preseason framing is itself a dated fact worth taking literally: Courier & Press runs this vote before the baseball season begins, not after it, which puts it on a different calendar than a postseason or end-of-year vote decided once a season has already played out.

How the Orthopaedic Associates preseason ballot actually works

The mechanic matches the standard Crowdsignal format: open poll.fm/16817285, find the baseball nominee to support among the names Courier & Press placed on that preseason ballot, select that name, and submit. Courier & Press's own framing for the 2026 round left no ambiguity about the invitation itself: "Vote for Courier & Press baseball preseason Player of the Year 2026," naming the ballot's purpose directly.

That framing left frequency unaddressed. Nothing on the page states whether one submission per browser is the rule, or whether a supporter may return and vote again before the round closes. Indiana fields preseason baseball across enough programs that a nominee's supporters looking for guidance on repeat voting will not find an answer on Courier & Press's own page; the organizer would need to publish that rule before it becomes fact.

Because this is a preseason vote rather than a postseason award, the practical window for supporting a nominee falls before Indiana's high school baseball season is underway, which is worth planning around directly.

The same masthead's football vote, and five other Indiana prep polls tracked here

Courier & Press runs more than this one ballot. Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year carries the same masthead into a different sport entirely, on its own separate ballot with its own separate nominee pool; a strong showing on the baseball vote carries no weight there, and neither shares a platform account with the other.

Only one of these seven runs before its season starts rather than after; the rest name a week, a class, or a year that points to results already on the field. Mixing up the Orthopaedic Associates baseball ballot with any of the football or basketball pages above means voting in the wrong sport entirely, not just the wrong week.

Supporting a nominee before Indiana's baseball season actually starts

Because this ballot runs preseason, before Indiana high school baseball games begin, building support happens on a different clock than a postseason vote: there is no in-season highlight to point to yet, only the nominee's name on Courier & Press's own page. Bookmarking poll.fm/16817285 directly matters more here than for a postseason award, since a fresh search risks surfacing the same masthead's football vote instead.

Courier & Press has not published an outside-promotion policy for this specific ballot, so there is no organizer rule here pointing supporters either toward or away from paid help. Readers weighing that kind of support for a preseason fan poll like this one can start with sports fan-poll vote support for the general mechanics.