Who is the Herald News Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

One sport, one newsroom: how this ballot differs from its Massachusetts neighbours

Most high school fan votes in Massachusetts spread across many sports. This one does not. The Herald News Baseball Player of the Week ballot is baseball-only, and its organizer is a single newsroom, The Herald-News, whose coverage area supplies the nominees. The vote is hosted on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm platform, at the address poll.fm/17049499.

That makes it a narrower proposition than the broader athlete ballots other publishers run, and narrower in audience than the statewide high school polls, because the nominees come from a small cluster of schools in the publisher's coverage area rather than from across the whole state. It is a sport-focused award decided by a public vote, and the program runs in the United States. The table below sets out those basics for a supporter in a hurry.

Who is nominated in the current cycle changes with every fresh poll the publisher starts on the platform, so only the live form shows the list for the week you care about.

The dated picture: which editions ran and when the 2026 window fell

This program's dated picture shows three confirmed edition years: 2022, 2025 and 2026. The 2026 ballot carried the title "Who is the Herald News Baseball Player of the Week May 18-23" and now displays a Poll Closed marker, so that edition is finished. The publisher's own launch announcement said voting remained open through July 3, which set the outer edge of that cycle's window beyond the week named in the title.

A nomination step precedes the fan vote: nominees were put forward based on performance during the season, with 16 athletes named for the 2026 edition. The exact nomination dates were not printed alongside the ballot. The Herald-News has also printed neither a cap on repeat voting nor any eligibility terms, and no standing category roster exists for this poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because the program is annual, a further edition is expected in 2027. Do not treat the May 18-23 label as a fixed calendar slot: the publisher titles each new poll for its own week during the baseball season, so the 2027 windows will be read off the fresh ballots rather than predicted from this one.

How a supporter casts a vote on the current ballot

The Crowdsignal form at poll.fm/17049499 is where a vote is cast. The ballot lists its nominees by player name and school; in the 2026 edition that meant 16 athletes drawn from Atlantis Charter, Diman, Durfee, Joseph Case, Somerset Berkley and Westport. A supporter selects a single choice and submits. No sign-in is demanded anywhere on the ballot, and the form asks nothing beyond the selection itself.

Each weekly edition is its own page on poll.fm, so a supporter who arrives later in the season may land on an older, finished poll. Check that the title names the current week before voting, and treat a Poll Closed label as final: that edition no longer accepts votes, and the publisher's next ballot is where support goes instead.

Once a poll closes, Crowdsignal displays the outcome beside each name as a percentage share with a raw vote total underneath. On the 2026 ballot, the leading finish held 79 percent of 243 counted votes. The platform does not describe any device filtering on this ballot, so anyone wanting a click to count should simply follow whatever the live form instructs, and come back for each fresh weekly edition the newspaper starts.

Where this ballot sits among Massachusetts sibling programs

Six sibling programs in Massachusetts share this page's market. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week are publisher-run, multi-sport ballots from other newsrooms, each answering to its own paper. The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week are statewide ballots, and the baseball one is the closest cousin in sport, drawing from a far wider pool of schools than The Herald-News coverage area.

The Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week covers a different sport and season entirely, and the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year is a player-of-the-year award rather than a weekly poll.

What separates this ballot is the combination of a single sport, a single publisher's coverage area, and a fresh poll for each week of the baseball season. A supporter's vote on this program carries no weight toward any sibling ballot, and a nominee who misses this week's list may appear on the next one, since each edition stands alone on the platform.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this poll

This ballot rewards reach more than anything else, because it is a straight single-choice public vote with no published statement from The Herald-News restricting how supporters rally. The organizer has not printed a policy on voting software or outside help for this poll, so the behaviour the ballot is plainly built for is ordinary outreach: passing the exact poll.fm address of the current week's edition to teammates, families, alumni and the wider school community, and repeating the ask for each fresh poll the newspaper starts through the season.

Timing matters more here than on a long-running award, since a weekly edition closes fast and a missed window cannot be recovered on that ballot. Paid vote packages exist for award-style public ballots, and how that market works is described on the award votes page, but no purchase changes the publisher's counting and no vendor of vote packages can promise a finish. Outreach that lands while the current poll is still open is the support a nominee's community controls directly.