High School

Sheehan wins ‘Prep Player of Week’ with an astounding 26,000 votes

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Let’s start this by saying we had three exceptionally good candidates for this week’s BaltimoreBaseball.com’s Prep Player of the Week.

Each of the three – Patterson Mill’s Austin Koehn, Chesapeake-Anne Arundel’s Joe Seidler, and Loyola Blakefield’s Jack Sheehan — garnered at least twice as many votes as any of the candidates last week.

But that’s only part of the story.

Combined, these three absolutely, positively blew the doors off the voting from our first week. Heck, our vote totals this week surpassed the 2011 Baltimore City Mayoral race tally (by about 7,000) – and probably will out-total this year’s mayoral election, too.

We had a mind boggling 53,507 votes cast in one week.

Yes, over 50,000 votes for a high school player of the week award. The piece by our Dean Jones Jr. had more than 500 shares on Facebook alone.

And our winner, Loyola’s Sheehan, collected an incredible 26,024 in what was a highly contested, back-and-forth race.

Even as a Calvert Hall alum, I have to give credit to the Loyola community for so fervently supporting its guy. And Sheehan certainly was deserving, given an unforgettable game against Mount Saint Joseph. The 6-foot-2, 175-pound senior hit a walkoff grand slam in the bottom of the seventh and also earned the win with five strong innings on the mound.

That’s what you call a scrapbook-worthy, never-forget kind-of-game.

Sheehan joins our first winner, Archbishop Spalding’s Billy Godrick, as BaltimoreBaseball.com’s 2016 Prep Players of the Week.

We’ll put up three new candidates Monday. If you want to submit a candidate for consideration, send an email to Dean@BaltimoreBaseball.com by 3 p.m. Sunday. Please provide as much detail on the player’s week as possible.

Voting starts as soon as we announce the candidates, and runs until every Thursday at 11:59 p.m. We’re kind of like the state of Florida here: You can vote as often as you like. It becomes a fun competition among schools and allows for players from smaller institutions and communities to compete with the larger ones.

It’s about persistence and spreading the word more than anything. And it’s also about shining a light on the great high school baseball being played in our area.

Dan Connolly

Dan Connolly has spent more than two decades as a print journalist in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Baltimore native and Calvert Hall graduate first covered the Orioles as a beat writer for the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record in 2001 before becoming The Baltimore Sun’s national baseball writer/Orioles reporter in 2005. He has won multiple state and national writing awards, including several from the Associated Press Sports Editors. In 2013 he was named Maryland Co-Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. And in 2015, he authored his first book, "100 Things Orioles Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die." He lives in York, with his wife, Karen, and three children, Alex, Annie, and Grace.