Colorado Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Colorado baseball ballot isn't shaped like its two football neighbors

Sports Illustrated's High School on SI network runs three separate Colorado fan votes across two seasons, and the baseball one doesn't work the way the other two do. The Colorado Football Player of the Week and Colorado Football Offensive Player of the Week polls each name one all-around nominee per program and run through a fall-long CHSAA season. Baseball runs a different shape. Confirmed live on si.com in May 2025, the Colorado spring baseball vote is framed around "top hitters": a weekly feature spotlighting several standout batting performances from that week's CHSAA slate, with the poll built around picking a favorite from that list rather than a single default nominee per school.

Small distinction, big effect on who even gets considered. A defensive standout, a shutout pitcher, a bunt-for-days leadoff man: none of them are the target audience of a "top hitters" ballot the way they'd be on an all-position Player of the Week poll. The format narrows the field before a single vote gets cast. Whoever gets featured has already cleared a batting-stat bar the editorial desk set that week, whether that's a home run total, a hit streak, or an RBI number nobody else in the state matched.

Whether SI publishes an exact, repeatable formula for that cut line isn't something the public record confirms. What is confirmed is the mechanic itself: weekly, spring, hitting-focused, live on the platform as of May 2025.

Why spring changes the competition for attention

Football owns the fall sports-media calendar in Colorado. Basketball owns winter. Spring is crowded, just differently: track, soccer, lacrosse, tennis, and golf all compete for the same fan attention baseball needs, but High School on SI doesn't run a competing statewide fan vote for most of those sports the way it does for football and, separately, the year-round Colorado Athlete of the Week program. That leaves the "top hitters" ballot with comparatively little in-network competition for a spring sports fan's click, even while it fights harder than football does for a share of attention outside the network.

The CHSAA spring season builds toward a May state tournament, so the version of the ballot that runs closest to that stretch is voting on performances that carry real postseason weight, not early-March tune-up numbers. A hitter who shows up on a late-April or May "top hitters" list is, by definition, doing it against playoff-caliber pitching. That's a different signal than a Week 2 football nominee back in September, when the season is still finding its shape.

None of this is a confirmed SI editorial policy. It's the structural consequence of running a hitting-stat ballot inside a season that gets sharper as it goes.

What the May 2025 record actually confirms, and what it doesn't

Here's the honest version. The "top hitters" format and its weekly cadence are confirmed live on si.com as of May 2025. Beyond that, the public record thins out fast. No searchable archive of past weekly features exists on the site the way a fan researching a specific hitter's history might expect. No per-device vote cap or cooldown window appears on the page itself. No fixed close day and time is stated anywhere a visitor can find without opening the live article for the current week.

That gap isn't unusual for this network. The Colorado football polls carry the same holes, no documented cap, no cached results page, and other state editions of the same SI product have run with and without a six-hour cooldown depending on the year. A voter or a campaign organizer who assumes last season's rules still apply is guessing, not confirming.

What can be stated plainly: this is a free poll, no account is needed to take part, and the mechanic deciding who even reaches the ballot is batting performance, not an all-around nomination.

How the weekly cycle actually runs on si.com

The ballot lives inside a weekly article at si.com/high-school/colorado/baseball, not a standalone permanent voting page. SBLive's Colorado desk, the same editorial operation behind the football polls, builds the "top hitters" list from that week's box scores across the CHSAA spring schedule, then embeds a fan poll for readers to pick a favorite from the featured names.

Because the article publishes fresh each week instead of living at one fixed URL, the safest habit for a voter or a program is bookmarking the section landing page and checking for the newest post, not trusting last week's link. A stale link outranking the current week's poll in a search result is a known failure mode for this kind of weekly-article format; it happens on the football side too.

Once a hitter is featured, the voting action itself is simple. Open the article, find the embedded widget, click a name. No sign-up screen sits between a reader and a vote.

Running a real campaign for a Colorado hitter

Getting featured is the harder problem, not the voting itself. A hitter putting up strong numbers in a small-town spring schedule, Sterling out on the Northeast Plains, say, or Palisade on the Western Slope, competes for the same weekly slots as a Front Range 5A program playing a deeper schedule against ranked opponents. A coach or parent who sends the box score, the stat line, and the opponent directly to the SBLive desk gives an under-the-radar performance a real chance at getting flagged before that week's list is finalized.

Once a hitter lands on the ballot, the campaign math looks like every other free fan-vote poll on this network: reach beats intensity. A travel-ball network sprawls across multiple high schools and summer programs, which can actually work against a single school's booster push if that same travel team splits its loyalty across two or three nominees in the same week. A tighter, single-school push works better: get the link into a coach's team chat, a booster club's mailing list, and a parents' Facebook group, and it tends to convert faster than a wider but thinner travel-ball audience, at least in the hours right after the article goes live.

Programs that have already worked their organic network and still need more reach before the article cycles out sometimes turn to structured vote-support services built for sports fan polls. The same rule applies here as on the football side: paced, human-pattern delivery holds up, and a rapid-fire burst that looks automated gets flagged and stripped. Reading the live si.com article's current terms before running any outside push is the smart first step, since a network-wide policy update can land mid-season without much notice. For the legal and platform-terms side of buying votes generally, is buying votes legal covers the framework.

Colorado runs plenty of other fan-vote programs besides this one: CHSAA sports polls like this, and separately, consumer readers'-choice programs such as Top of the Town and Best of Denver, which follow an entirely different annual, business-category format. The Colorado contests directory lists what else is currently active statewide, and the contest voting how-to hub covers pacing a multi-week campaign instead of one push.