Ashland Times-Gazette Preseason Baseball Player of the Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ashland Times-Gazette preseason baseball poll is

This public-vote award ballot comes from the Ashland Times-Gazette, an Ohio newspaper whose printed publisher name is The Times Gazette. It asks readers to pick a preseason player of the year in baseball before the season itself begins, and it belongs to the newspaper's high school sports output. The ballot platform is Crowdsignal, reached at poll.fm, and the confirmed address for the 2025 edition is https://poll.fm/15238056.

The market is Ashland, Ohio, and the nominee slate reaches beyond the city itself: the 2025 ballot drew nominees affiliated with Ashland, Crestview, Hillsdale and South Central, a set of area high school programs rather than a single school's roster. That footprint is what gives the poll its audience, since each nominee brings the families and followers of a different program to the same ballot.

Because the nominees are high school baseball players, this page names the publisher, the sport, the season and the school affiliations instead of any individual athlete. The mechanics, the dates and the published results are the useful facts for a supporter, and those are what the rest of this page sets out.

The dated history: 2022, 2025 and the March window

Two confirmed cycles stand for the poll, 2022 and 2025. That spacing is why the programme reads as annual in shape rather than as a brand-new launch, with 2026 as the expected next cycle. Each edition sits in the preseason slot, and the voting window falls in March: the 2025 ballot ran across March alone, opening and closing inside that single month.

The 2025 edition has closed. Its poll.fm page is now marked as a closed poll, but Crowdsignal keeps the final standings visible, and those standings are the most concrete published facts about the programme. The leading nominee finished at 63 percent of the vote on 4,949 votes. The runner-up held 21 percent on 1,629 votes, and the third option stood at 9 percent on 723 votes. A margin that wide is typical of a small-market newspaper poll where one program's community turns out in force.

What the newspaper has not printed is the rest of the frame around those results: no exact opening or closing day for the baseball ballot, no nomination method, and no rule on repeat visits by a supporter; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Platform-side round dates for any future edition are equally absent from print. A supporter planning a push therefore works from the March slot and watches the ballot itself, rather than from a published schedule.

How a supporter votes on the baseball ballot

The mechanic is the plain Crowdsignal format. The supporter loads the poll.fm page, sees the nominee slate with the running percentage beside each option, marks one nominee, and submits. The page then refreshes with the updated split. There is no write-in step on this ballot: the newspaper posts the slate, and the reader's only action is choosing among the posted options.

Two practical points follow from that format. First, because the standings are visible before you vote, a supporter backing an option that trails badly can see the size of the gap before committing, which shapes how a family or a program community plans its outreach during the March window. Second, the ballot prints no instructions about accounts, cookies or repeat visits. The Ashland Times-Gazette has not published a daily-vote rule or any per-supporter limit for this baseball poll, so the confirmation screen after submitting is the only feedback the ballot gives.

Timing matters more than technique here. The 2025 address now shows only the closed result, so a vote cast there today does nothing. A live edition appears at its own poll.fm address when the preseason window opens, and the whole usable life of the ballot falls inside March. Anyone supporting a nominee should find the live address early in the month rather than discovering the poll after it has closed, which is what happened to anyone arriving at the 2025 page now.

How this ballot sits among Ohio's newspaper polls

Ohio has a dense field of publisher-run public votes, and the Ashland Times-Gazette poll is the small-market, single-sport end of it. The larger programmes nearby are weekly athlete ballots: the Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week runs on a rolling weekly cycle, as do the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week. Those three are metro-newspaper series that recur across every sport season, while the Ashland ballot is a once-a-year preseason baseball question.

The other siblings differ in sport or in medium. The Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week are Dayton-market ballots, the latter fixed to football. The Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote is a television-station programme rather than a newspaper one, which changes the audience that reaches the ballot.

What makes the Ashland poll distinct within this set is its shape: a preseason, baseball-only, player-of-the-year question in a single-market readership, with a nominee slate drawn from Ashland, Crestview, Hillsdale and South Central. A supporter comparing options should match the ballot to the actual contest, because a weekly athlete vote and a preseason player of the year vote reward different outreach calendars.

Backing a nominee in a short preseason window

A March-only window with a visible percentage counter rewards early, organized outreach. The ballot shows the standings as they stand, so a program community that starts asking for votes in the first days of the window sets the tone of the race, while a community that waits often faces a gap the counter makes plain to everyone. For the Ashland Times-Gazette baseball ballot specifically, that means finding the live poll.fm address as soon as the preseason edition appears rather than relying on the closed 2025 page.

Where the organizer stands on outside help is the open question: the Ashland Times-Gazette has printed no statement about purchased or automated votes for this poll, so no published rule either permits or bars them. What is certain is the format, an open Crowdsignal vote with no printed per-supporter limit, and the deadline, a close inside March that the paper does not announce in advance. Our award-votes page describes the general service category for readers weighing that route, without promising any particular outcome on this ballot.