The Taunton Daily Gazette Fans' Choice Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Fans' Choice baseball vote is and who runs it

This award is a reader vote run by the Taunton Daily Gazette, a newspaper based in Taunton, Massachusetts, whose domain is tauntongazette.com. The ballot sits in the paper's scholastic sports section and asks exactly one question: who deserves to be named the Fans' Choice Baseball Player of the Year for the season just played. It is decided by fans rather than by the sports desk, a contrast with the Gazette's all-scholastic listings that the same desk publishes at the end of the summer.

Crowdsignal carries the voting itself, reached through poll.fm. The current ballot address is poll.fm/17265838, and it belongs to the 2026 edition, which has now closed. Because the poll lives on a third-party polling service instead of the Gazette's own domain, the ballot page carries the question, the nominee slate and the vote button, while the context around the vote, the voting announcement and the result, lives in the Gazette's sports articles.

For a supporter, the practical shape is simple: one question, one list of high school baseball players from the paper's coverage area, one vote button. For a business or family thinking about backing a nominee, the important facts are the organizer's identity, the platform, and the window, all of which are set out below.

The dated record: editions, the 2026 window and what is unpublished

Two editions of this vote are confirmed: 2025 and 2026. Both fall in the paper's summer high school baseball cycle, and the voting window in each edition runs across June and July. The 2026 ballot carried a hard deadline that the Gazette printed in its own voting announcement: polls were open through noon on Tuesday, July 28. After that moment the poll closed, and the ballot page at poll.fm/17265838 now displays a closed poll rather than an active vote form.

The result of the 2026 vote was folded into the paper's end-of-season baseball coverage in early August, where the winner was named alongside the Gazette's all-scholastic selections. That reporting is the paper's own confirmation that the fan vote concluded and produced a named winner for the 2026 season.

Several facts are absent from the printed material. The Gazette has put out no category roster for this ballot, which is unsurprising given that the poll asks a single question, but it also has printed no cap on repeat voting, no eligibility text and no exact opening day for the 2026 window; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps matter most during a live window, when a supporter deciding whether a second vote counts has nothing printed to go on. Taken together, the organizer's published material covers the question, the nominees, the deadline and the result, and leaves the voting rules unstated.

How a supporter votes in the Gazette's baseball poll today

The 2026 ballot works as a straightforward fan vote. A supporter follows the poll.fm link the Gazette prints in its voting article, sees the question about the Fans' Choice Baseball Player of the Year, and picks one of the named high school players from the radio-button list. Pressing the vote button logs the choice on Crowdsignal. There is no nomination round on this ballot: the Gazette selects the nominee slate itself before the window opens, so a supporter's only action is choosing among the players already named.

Timing matters more than technique. The 2026 window shut at noon on Tuesday, July 28, and a closed poll accepts no further votes, so any push for a nominee has to land inside the June and July span while the ballot is live. Because the paper has printed no rule about casting a second vote, the safest assumption for a supporter is that the live ballot's own behaviour is the rule: if the page accepts another vote, the platform allowed it, and if it does not, it did not.

No account, login or payment appears in the published description of this ballot. The vote costs nothing, the nominee slate is fixed by the paper, and the result is tallied by the polling service. A supporter who wants to influence the outcome therefore works on turnout: reaching the people who already follow Taunton-area high school baseball and pointing them at the Gazette's voting article before the deadline passes.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

The Fans' Choice baseball vote is one of several high school sports fan votes running in Massachusetts, and it occupies a specific slot among them. It is a single end-of-season award for one sport, baseball, run by one local newspaper for its own coverage area, whereas several neighbouring programmes are weekly honours that reset every seven days. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week are both publisher-run weekly votes in other parts of the state, and the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week votes run at the state level rather than for one paper's readership.

Two further neighbours round out the family: the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year, the softball counterpart to a season-ending honour, and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week vote for the winter sport. What distinguishes the Gazette's ballot is its scope: it covers one sport, one season-ending question, and one publisher's audience in and around Taunton. A nominee on this ballot competes only against the other players the Gazette named for that baseball season, not against a statewide or multi-sport field, which is why the vote's outcome is decided by the paper's own readership rather than a statewide fan base.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this ballot

Support in the Fans' Choice baseball vote is a turnout problem with a hard edge: the 2026 window shut at noon on Tuesday, July 28, and a closed poll cannot be voted in. The Gazette's own voting article is the best shareable asset a supporter has, because it carries the poll.fm link and the deadline in the paper's voice, which lands better with local readers than a bare ballot address. Sharing it through team groups, family chats and school communities in the Taunton area reaches exactly the audience whose attention the vote weighs.

Because the nominee slate is fixed by the paper, there is no nomination step to campaign through; effort goes entirely into getting people to the live ballot during June and July. The organizer has printed no rule on outside help or on repeat voting, so a push that stays within ordinary sharing, reminders and word of mouth is the shape of support this ballot plainly expects. Anything beyond that sits in unstated territory, and the general picture of what outside help looks like is covered in our votes guide.