Arundel’s Michael Prosperi had a tough assignment last week. The junior left-hander needed to shut down North County while his offense struggled to score.

Prosperi did his part, pitching a complete-game shutout in the 1-0 victory. He allowed three hits and struck out nine. And that performance helped land him BaltimoreBaseball.com’s “Prep Ballplayer of the Week” award.

Prosperi received 63 percent of the 9,000-plus votes cast this week. There was a close battle for second between Bel Air’s Zack Radcliffe (20 percent) and Marriott Ridge’s Josh Olsufka (17 percent).

We’ll have three more candidates Monday and you can vote – early and often – through Thursday night. The winner is announced every Friday.

One thing you may have noticed this week is that we added a Captcha generator. No one is a fan of extra steps, but we felt the need to do so to make sure the votes were getting to the proper candidates.

This isn’t a scientific poll; we want schools to battle back and forth for their favorite candidates, and so you can vote more than once. That’s part of the fun of this. But we also want to make sure it’s a fair process, and that one person hasn’t figured out a way to rig the system.

Thanks for working with us on this.