Colorado High School Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Is the Colorado Baseball Player of the Year the same poll as "top hitters"?

No. They share an organizer and a sport, and that's about where the overlap ends. High School on SI runs two separate Colorado baseball fan votes across the same CHSAA spring season, and treating them as one poll is the single most common mix-up a program makes when it goes looking for the annual honor.

The weekly ballot is the one confirmed live on si.com in May 2025, built around a "top hitters" format: a rotating list of standout batting performances, chosen by the editorial desk from that week's box scores, with readers picking a favorite from an already-filtered group. A pitcher who threw a no-hitter or a shortstop who turned three double plays in one game isn't the target of that specific ballot; hitting stats set the field before a single vote gets cast.

The Player of the Year vote works differently. It runs once, after the spring season and CHSAA's postseason wrap, on the general si.com/high-school/colorado hub rather than the dedicated si.com/high-school/colorado/baseball address the weekly poll uses. One article. One season's worth of candidates, not a rotating lineup of the sport's best hitters that particular week. For how the wider format works across other CHSAA sports on the same hub, the Colorado High School Player of the Year page covers the shared mechanics.

Why the annual ballot opens only once the CHSAA spring season ends

Timing is the whole story here. Spring baseball runs March into May in Colorado, and the "top hitters" poll cycles through that entire stretch, week after week, spotlighting different hitters as the box scores roll in. A team can appear on that ballot in April and vanish from it the following week. It's a snapshot, not a verdict.

The annual ballot waits. It opens only once the season, and CHSAA's baseball postseason, actually concludes, which pushes it into late May or early June most years, though the exact publish date isn't fixed to a public calendar entry the way a Friday-night football kickoff is. That gap matters for anyone building a campaign around it. A hot April doesn't automatically carry into the annual vote the way it would carry a hitter through three or four consecutive "top hitters" features.

What the editorial desk weighs instead is the full season: a spring's worth of at-bats and innings, not one memorable week against a weak opponent. A hitter who cooled off in May after a hot April open still has a real shot if the season total holds up. A player who caught fire only in the tournament's final week can just as easily jump into contention late. Neither pattern shows up on the weekly ballot's rotating spotlight.

What's actually confirmed about the Colorado baseball POY ballot, and what isn't?

Here's the honest accounting. Confirmed: an annual cadence, a spring sport, and a weekly "top hitters" precursor poll that was live and documented on si.com as of May 2025. Confirmed, too: the ballot runs as a dated article on the general si.com/high-school/colorado hub, the same page that names a Player of the Year across CHSAA's other sports.

Not confirmed: an exact launch year for the baseball-specific POY ballot, a fixed open-and-close calendar date, a per-device vote cap, or any searchable archive of past winners. That last gap is the one that trips up the most searches. A parent or recruiter looking for who won a given year's Colorado baseball POY won't find a browsable list; each year's result exists only inside that year's own dated article, if it was covered at all.

Worth sitting with for a second: that gap isn't an oversight. SI's high-school network runs dozens of state-and-sport combinations through the same lightweight publishing model, one article per result, and baseball's annual vote isn't singled out for less documentation than its football or basketball counterparts. It's the format, not this particular sport, that keeps a browsable archive from existing.

Who decides which Colorado hitters and pitchers reach the Player of the Year ballot?

Nomination isn't a public form, and there's no separate submission address just for the annual vote the way there sometimes is for a weekly feature. The High School on SI Colorado desk builds its baseball POY field largely from the same reporting pipeline that feeds the weekly "top hitters" posts, except stretched across an entire spring instead of one week's box scores.

That has a real consequence for programs outside the state's most-covered markets. A player from a small-town CHSAA program who never landed on a single "top hitters" list during the season starts the annual conversation with less of a paper trail than a Front Range hitter who appeared in that rotating feature three or four times across March and April. Being featured weekly doesn't guarantee the annual nod, but it does build a visible record the editorial desk can point back to once the season wraps.

A coach or program contact who sends a full-season summary, not just a single standout game, directly to the desk gives an under-covered season a real chance at reaching that final field. Waiting until after the article publishes to make the case is, structurally, already too late; by then that year's field is set.

How does a Colorado program actually campaign for the POY ballot?

Once the article goes live, the campaign math looks like every other free fan-vote poll on this network, just compressed into a shorter window than a season-long push. Reach beats intensity. A team group chat, a booster club's email list, alumni who've stayed connected to the program: two or three of those channels running together tends to outperform leaning on the single biggest one alone.

Geography still shapes how that plays out. Cherry Creek, Valor Christian, Regis Jesuit, and ThunderRidge all draw from a dense, well-connected Front Range fan base that's already paying attention to prep baseball most springs. Sterling, out on the Northeast Plains, or Palisade, on the Western Slope, work from a smaller realistic voter pool, but a booster-club text or a single Facebook post can reach most of a small town in an evening, something a sprawling suburban mailing list often needs several days to match. Neither structure guarantees the win; the annual ballot doesn't reserve slots by market size any more than the weekly poll does.

Programs that have worked their natural network hard and still see a real gap before the ballot closes sometimes turn to a vote-support service built for sports fan polls. Paced, human-pattern delivery that matches the article's normal traffic holds up; a rapid-fire burst that reads as automated gets flagged and stripped. Reading the live si.com article's current terms before running any outside push is worth doing, since network-wide policy can change between seasons without much notice. Is buying votes legal covers that ground for fan-vote polls generally.

Colorado runs several other si.com ballots worth knowing about if baseball isn't the only program in your orbit: the weekly Baseball Player of the Week "top hitters" poll this page has compared against, and, on the basketball side, Boys Basketball Player of the Week. Outside CHSAA sport entirely, Colorado also runs readers'-choice programs on an annual business-category format, including Top of the Town and Best of Denver. The Colorado contests directory lists what else is currently active statewide, and the online contest voting guide covers general campaign mechanics beyond this one ballot.