The Journal Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Journal's baseball award is and who runs it

This award, organized by the Journal, names a yearly baseball player of the year among prep athletes in the publisher's Michigan coverage area, which reaches small communities in the state's southwest. The format is a straightforward public poll: Crowdsignal hosts it at poll.fm, and the live ballot address is poll.fm/17239083. The program's vertical is sport, and its audience is the families, classmates and local readers who follow prep baseball in towns such as Mendon, Marcellus and White Pigeon.

The award differs from the weekly formats that dominate Michigan's prep sports polling. Those programs, run by MLive in several markets and by High School on SI across the state, reset their ballots every week during a season. The Journal's award names a player of the year, which puts the whole baseball conversation onto a single ballot each cycle rather than a rolling series.

Since every nominee is a prep athlete, this page describes the ballot by publisher, sport and community and does not name any individual nominee. The communities listed above are the places the ballot itself carries.

The dated record: editions, the July window and the final tally

The confirmed years for this Journal award are 2023, 2025 and 2026. No 2024 edition appears among them, so the published run has a gap, and the program is nonetheless marked annual with a next expected run in 2027. The voting window falls in July in each confirmed cycle, with the month opening and closing the window.

The most recent ballot, poll 17239083, closed with a decisive result. The Marcellus nominee finished at 98 percent, carrying 1,182 of the 1,208 total votes cast. The White Pigeon nominee drew 1 percent, or 17 votes, and the Mendon nominee also finished at 1 percent with 9 votes. Those figures come straight from the closed poll page, which displays the final percentages, the raw counts and the total alongside the poll closed notice.

What the Journal has not printed anywhere on its ballot is the precise open and close date of the July window, any category detail beyond the award itself, and any per-person voting limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The platform also holds no promotion schedule for this market, so round dates for future editions are likewise absent. Everything dated that the publisher does make public sits on the poll page itself: the title, the closed notice and the final tally.

How a supporter votes on the Journal's baseball ballot

Voting here takes little effort. Anyone backing a nominee visits the Journal's ballot at poll.fm/17239083, scans the option list where each entry pairs a player with a Michigan community, selects the preferred nominee and submits. Crowdsignal logs the choice and updates the running total on the same page. There is no nomination round to navigate, no bracket and no separate category ballot; the entire award is a single pick on a single poll.

Right now that poll shows a closed state. The page title carries the poll closed notice, and the body displays the final counts from the July 2026 edition rather than an active voting form. A supporter arriving today cannot cast a vote on this ballot; the action available is reading the result. When the Journal opens its next baseball poll, expected in the 2027 cycle, the publisher's pages are where the new ballot address will surface, since the current poll.fm link points at the closed edition.

Nothing on the ballot page requires an account, and the poll presents no sign-in step. The Journal also prints no instructions about repeat voting, so the poll's own behavior is the only guide a supporter has. For a small-town newspaper award, the practical advice is simple: find the live ballot in July, pick the Marcellus, Mendon or White Pigeon nominee of your choice, and submit before the poll closes.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan's public-vote sports polling is crowded, and almost all of it is weekly football. MLive runs player of the week ballots for the Bay City area and the Kalamazoo area, and separate weekly programs cover the Flint area, the Jackson area and the Ann Arbor area. High School on SI fields a statewide athlete of the week ballot. Every one of them reports to a separate publisher and keeps its own schedule.

The Journal's award is the baseball outlier in that set. It is yearly rather than weekly, it covers baseball rather than football, and its market is a cluster of small communities, Mendon, Marcellus and White Pigeon among them, rather than a named city or a statewide field. Its scale is correspondingly modest: the closed 2026 ballot drew 1,208 total votes, a figure a weekly MLive football poll can reach in a shorter span because it refreshes every week and rides football's larger audience.

That difference matters for supporters deciding where to spend effort. A weekly ballot rewards fast, repeated mobilization across many rounds; the Journal's yearly award concentrates everything into a single July window where a well-organized community can swing the whole result, as the 98 percent winning share on the most recent ballot shows. The publisher, the sport and the cadence are all distinct, and none of the sibling programs competes with this ballot for the same vote.

Strengthening support for a Journal baseball nominee

Because the whole award is a single July poll, support for a Mendon, Marcellus or White Pigeon nominee has to be built before the window closes, not spread across weeks. The mechanic gives no second chances: a pick and a submit on the ballot, and the tally is final when the poll closes. That makes the days between the ballot opening and closing the entire campaign.

The Journal publishes no rules text on its ballot page about outside help, paid support or voting software, so nobody can quote a publisher policy for this poll; the absence of a rule is not the same as permission, and the publisher's own pages are the authority. What is known is the scale: 1,208 votes decided the most recent edition, so even a modest, well-timed community push moves a ballot of this size more than it would move a statewide poll.

Supporters looking for tactics that fit a small newspaper poll, from social sharing to community coordination, can read how to get more votes online, and anyone weighing paid support should first read the legality guide and the Journal's own terms.