The MyCentralJersey.com Readers' Choice Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Readers' Choice Baseball Player of the Week is and who runs it

MyCentralJersey.com, the Gannett daily news outlet covering Central Jersey, runs a recurring Readers' Choice vote that names a baseball Player of the Week among the area's high school players. Each week during the spring season, the outlet's sports coverage nominates a group of players from across its coverage area and asks readers to choose the standout. The series is part of the paper's broader Readers' Choice brand, which turns editorial judgment into a reader-facing tally.

The balloting runs on Crowdsignal, reachable through poll.fm. MyCentralJersey.com does not build its own voting software; it links readers from its baseball articles to a Crowdsignal survey page, where every nominee appears beside the school he attends. The voting URL attached to this reference is the newest ballot of the series. When a round closes, the publisher marks the poll closed and later reports the winner in a follow-up piece, as it did when fans voted a Highland Park player to the weekly honor in April.

For a reader, the practical picture is simple: an established New Jersey newsroom, a standard polling platform, and a nominee list that turns over weekly through the season. The table below sets out the fixed facts.

The dated facts: which seasons are confirmed and what the publisher has not printed

Three seasons of the series are confirmed: 2023, 2025 and 2026. The recurring windows fall in April and May, which matches the New Jersey high school baseball calendar. For the 2026 season specifically, MyCentralJersey.com's own article gave the cutoff in plain terms: "Voting concludes on Wednesday, April 8, at noon, so ensure your favorite player receives your backing!" That sentence is the page's firmest dated fact, and it doubles as proof the publisher sets and states a hard deadline for each round rather than leaving polls open indefinitely.

What the publisher has not printed anywhere on the ballot page is a forward calendar: no open date, no nomination date, and no schedule for the rounds that follow the April 8 close. The full picture of when the next ballot opens, and how many weeks the season's voting will run, must be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The per-round rules raise the same gap: the ballot page states no vote cap, no one-per-day instruction, and no eligibility text, so the operative rule for any given week is whatever MyCentralJersey.com's article for that week says.

The gap between the 2023 season and the 2025 season is also simply what the confirmed years show; the publisher's archived coverage fills in the rest, and nobody should guess at it here. Treated as a spring series with stated cutoffs and silent rule pages, it behaves exactly as its weekly articles describe.

How a supporter votes in the current round

Few fan votes are simpler to work. A supporter follows the link MyCentralJersey.com publishes in its weekly baseball article, which lands on the Crowdsignal survey page at poll.fm. The ballot carries that week's question about who should be the Readers' Choice Baseball Player of the Week, lists each nominee beside the school he attends, and offers a radio button per player. The supporter picks one, submits, and Crowdsignal logs the choice and displays the running tally. No account creation, no payment, and no separate registration stand between the reader and the ballot.

Timing is the part that catches people. The 2026 round closed at noon on Wednesday, April 8, per the publisher's article, which urged readers to back their favorite player before the cutoff. Weekly polls of this kind close hard, and a vote submitted after the deadline simply does not count, so supporters who intend to rally a school community should share the link early in the window rather than the evening before it ends.

Because the nominee roster turns over weekly, the address of the active ballot turns over with it. The voting URL attached to this reference leads to the newest ballot of the series. If it is marked closed, that round is over and the next one will live at a fresh address published in the following week's MyCentralJersey.com baseball coverage. A closed poll still shows the final tally, which is useful for checking a result after the publisher's winner announcement.

How this ballot sits beside its New Jersey neighbours

Central Jersey is well served by reader votes, and this series is the baseball-specific entry in a crowded field. The Asbury Park Press High School Athlete of the Week covers the shore region with a multi-sport weekly format. The Courier-Post runs a South Jersey girls basketball player of the week poll for the southern part of the state. Jersey Sports Zone keeps a football game ball vote during the fall, and statewide programs include the boys basketball player of the week, the football player of the week, and the NJ MileSplit boys performer of the week for track and cross country.

What distinguishes the MyCentralJersey.com vote is its narrow focus: baseball only, Central Jersey coverage area only, and a Readers' Choice framing that hands the whole decision to the audience rather than to the sports desk. Each of these programs answers to its own publisher, runs on its own ballot address, and sets its own deadlines, so a win in the Readers' Choice baseball poll carries no standing in any of the others.

For a nominee's family, the practical takeaway is to treat each publisher's series separately and follow that publisher's article for the cutoff times, since none of the six programs above shares rules with another.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this specific poll

Support in this series is won inside a short weekly window with a noon Wednesday cutoff, so the campaigns that move tallies are the ones that move fast. MyCentralJersey.com publishes the ballot link inside its own baseball article, which means every share should point at that article or at the poll.fm address it carries, never at a stale link from a previous week. School baseball families in the coverage area tend to rally through team group chats and the school's athletic social accounts, and a direct ask with the live link outperforms a generic plea.

The organizer's stated rules matter here. MyCentralJersey.com has reported weekly winners as the product of fan voting, and its coverage treats the tally as the decision. The ballot page itself publishes no vote cap and no daily-return instruction, so the safe course is to follow whatever the current week's article states and trust the live form to enforce it. For supporters weighing outside help, the site's own votes guide, /how-to/get-more-votes-online/, explains the general mechanics of fan votes, and the service comparison on /buy-award-votes/ explains what award-style ballots like this one involve.