Minnesota High School Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters get wrong before they click

Here is the problem: if you search "Minnesota high school player of the week" during baseball season, you get three different polls in the same feed at si.com/high-school/minnesota. The all-sport Athlete of the Week runs year-round. The Football Player of the Week ran September through November. And this one — the Baseball Player of the Week — runs April and May. They look similar in the article feed. They are not the same poll.

The practical difference matters. The football POTW closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Central time. The baseball POTW closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. For a Minnesota voter, that is midnight Saturday becoming midnight Sunday — roughly an hour earlier than football fans are used to. Miss the PT close and the vote is gone. The editors are different too: the football poll's contact is separate from Jack Butler, who runs the baseball nominations at [email protected].

Open the right article before you start clicking.

The May 2025 ballot: what 11 nominees reveal about the field

The confirmed May 12, 2025 ballot is the clearest picture of how the Minnesota baseball POTW actually works. Eleven nominees. Three complete-game pitching performances anchored the list — Owen Marsolek of Duluth Marshall threw a no-hitter with 17 strikeouts, Cason Carter of Richfield went the distance with 10 strikeouts, and Tanner Ross of Proctor finished his with 7. A 17-strikeout no-hitter is an unusual nomination by any standard; it is not the kind of game-line that shows up on most state baseball ballots.

The position players filled the rest. Oliver Taynton at Maple Grove had 4 RBIs. Ethan Jacobs at Spring Lake Park hit 3 RBIs on 3 hits. Brady Larson at Hutchinson added 3 RBIs. Jack Gessner of Woodbury contributed 3 RBIs in a relief appearance — a relief outing earning a nomination is itself worth noting; the editors are not limiting the ballot to starters.

Geographically, the list ran from Duluth in the north to Richfield inside the Twin Cities metro to Pine Island in southeastern Minnesota. That spread is typical. MSHSL baseball is genuinely statewide — programs from smaller towns like Proctor and Pine Island appear alongside the suburban programs. The community around a program like Proctor, in a small town, is no less connected than a larger suburb. Both have networks that can move votes. The game they run to mobilize those networks is different.

No public winner was announced for this specific week. SI does not publish raw vote totals for the baseball poll, and no winner-announcement article was found in search results. That gap matters strategically: if your nominee is on the ballot, you are competing blind. There is no last-week's winning percentage to benchmark against, no visible leaderboard mid-poll. The only number that matters is what the counter reads when Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT arrives.

A short season and a short runway

Minnesota's baseball season runs from roughly mid-April through the state tournament in late May. That is the entire window for the baseball POTW. Compare that to football, which runs late August through November and includes playoffs. A baseball player gets fewer chances to land on the list, and a team gets fewer windows to mobilize.

Which makes Jack Butler's nomination email more valuable than most players realize. A program that submits every eligible week — full stat line, opponent, result, sent Saturday night — gives Butler what he needs before the ballot is built. Programs that wait to see if SI noticed a great game on its own risk being left off ballots they had a real case to be on, because the nominations are submission-driven.

Once on the ballot, the Sunday close is the only race that counts. Baseball weekends run Friday and Saturday; casual voters check scores and drift away by Saturday night. The supporters who come back to push the link on Sunday — one more post in the team channel, one final nudge from the booster page — are working into a window most fans have already left. A spring season this short does not give a program many shots. The ones that land should be converted.

Other Minnesota contests are at /usa/minnesota/; the full national directory is at /usa/. The spring window is short — the campaigns that land nominations early and push hard on Sunday are the ones worth watching when results appear Monday morning.