The Bulletin Preseason Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What makes this ballot different from its Connecticut siblings

Most of the Connecticut high school sports ballots covered on this site share a shape: a weekly rhythm, a fresh question every few days during the season, and a new set of nominees each round. The Bulletin Preseason Baseball Player of the Year breaks that pattern in three ways, and those differences matter to anyone planning how to support a nominee.

The first difference is timing. This is a preseason award. The 2025 voting window fell in April, which places the ballot at the very front of the baseball calendar, before the weekly player of the week series has much of a history to draw on. A preseason poll asks readers to judge early promise rather than accumulated season statistics, and that changes who has reason to vote: the audience is built from offseason anticipation, winter workout buzz and returning-starter talk rather than from box scores.

The second difference is cadence. Where the Connecticut High School Baseball Player of the Week program resets its question again and again through the spring, this award asks a single season-defining question. There is no next week's ballot to recover a weak showing. A nominee who starts slowly in this poll cannot simply wait for a fresh round, which is why early momentum carries unusual weight here compared with the weekly formats.

The third difference is scope. The sibling programs on this site cover football, basketball, boys lacrosse and girls lacrosse, each as its own weekly series, and the Connecticut Gatorade Football Player of the Year sits at the other end of the calendar as a season-capping honor. Among all of these, this ballot stands alone in combining a baseball focus with a preseason frame and a player of the year title. A vote cast here supports a claim about the whole year ahead, not a single week behind.

For a supporter, those three differences add up to a simple planning conclusion. The window is short, the question does not repeat, and the audience arrives with offseason energy. Whatever push a school community intends to make, it has to be ready before the ballot opens, because the April window in 2025 left little room for a slow start. The exact dates for any future edition are not fixed in print; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Who runs the program, where it lives and how the ballot works

The Bulletin Preseason Baseball Player of the Year is organized by The Bulletin, a Connecticut newspaper whose online home is norwichbulletin.com. The paper serves the Norwich area and the eastern Connecticut communities around it, and its sports coverage has long included reader polls as a way to draw its audience into the high school season. This award is one of those reader features: a single public question, published on the paper's behalf, asking who deserves the preseason player of the year label.

The voting itself runs on Crowdsignal, the polling platform reached through poll.fm. The confirmed ballot for the 2025 edition lives at poll.fm/15276847, and that address is the voting URL for the program. Crowdsignal hosts thousands of reader polls of this kind, and its ballots share a familiar layout: a question at the top, a list of radio-button answers beneath it, a vote button, and a results view that appears once a ballot closes or once a reader has voted.

The 2025 ballot paired each nominee with a school, drawing from communities across eastern Connecticut. The towns represented on that ballot included Plainfield, Griswold and Killingly, along with Norwich's technical high school and NFA. That geography matters for supporters, because it shows the award is a regional reader poll rather than a statewide ranking: the nominee pool comes from the paper's own coverage area, and the voting audience is the paper's readership plus the school communities involved.

The facts of the program, as they stand, are these:

Nothing in that table names a host city for the award itself, because none is published. The program lives where its organizer lives and where its nominee schools sit, in eastern Connecticut. For the nominee list and the question text of the current edition, go straight to the ballot and confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The 2025 edition and what the final numbers showed

The most recent confirmed edition of this award ran its voting window in April 2025, and its ballot closed with a clear result. The leading nominee finished at 31 percent of the vote on 13,435 votes. The runner-up finished at 24 percent on 10,505 votes. Those figures come straight from the closed poll's own results display, which Crowdsignal keeps visible after the Poll Closed banner goes up.

Two things about those numbers are worth a supporter's attention. The first is the size of the tally. A poll whose leader alone drew 13,435 votes is not a small staff experiment; it is a ballot that reached deep into the school communities of eastern Connecticut. That scale shapes what kind of push works. In a field this size, a handful of extra shares on a personal account moves almost nothing, while a coordinated effort across a whole school community, its families and its local followers can move a real share of the total.

The second is the gap at the top. A 31 percent leader against a 24 percent runner-up is a competitive but not insurmountable margin, and the remaining nominees split the rest of the vote. In a single-question poll with no weekly reset, that shape is typical: the field consolidates around a few names as the window closes, and late momentum matters most for the challengers rather than the leader. A campaign that waits until the final days to start is trying to close a gap that has had the whole April window to widen.

The 2025 edition was not the program's start. The award has a confirmed edition in 2022 as well, which is what qualifies it as an annual program on this page. The gap between the 2022 and 2025 edition years means the schedule has not been perfectly continuous in the material available here, so treating April as a guaranteed slot would be a guess. What is fixed is the pattern: a preseason window, a single question, a closed poll with published percentages at the end.

For the next edition, the nominee list, the question wording and the closing date are all decided when The Bulletin publishes the new ballot. None of those details can be read off the 2025 results page. The dependable habit is to check the paper's sports coverage as the high school season approaches and confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Rules, limits and the details this page cannot print

A reference page is only as useful as it is honest about its gaps, and this program has several. The exact open and close dates of the voting window are not published in advance anywhere here; the April placement of the 2025 window is the confirmed fact, and nothing more precise travels with it. Neither the category list nor a voting ceiling is printed there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That sentence covers the three details supporters ask about most. The category list: this ballot appears to be a single-question award rather than a multi-category contest, but the full structure of any future edition is decided when The Bulletin publishes it. The voting ceiling: Crowdsignal polls can be configured to allow repeat voting, to restrict it, or to sit anywhere in between, and the configuration is chosen per ballot by the organizer. Whether a reader may vote once, once per day, or as often as they like in this poll is not stated ahead of time. Eligibility, in the sense of who counts as a valid voter, falls under the same heading.

The nomination process is likewise not an open form. The nominee pool on the 2025 ballot was assembled alongside the paper's preseason coverage, pairing players with their schools, and there is no indication that readers add names themselves. If a player believes they belong on a future ballot, the route runs through The Bulletin's sports desk and its coverage of their school, not through the poll page.

What the organizer's behavior does show is consistent. The Bulletin presents the poll as a reader feature, closes it on schedule, and publishes the final percentages. The platform, Crowdsignal, displays a Poll Closed banner and freezes the tally. Those are the mechanics a supporter can rely on. Everything else, from the next window's dates to the repeat-voting behavior of the next ballot, is set fresh with each edition.

The practical advice that follows is unglamorous but sound. Read the live ballot before voting, note whatever the page itself says about voting frequency, and treat the poll's own prompts as the operative rule for that edition. Where the ballot is silent, the silence is the answer until the organizer says otherwise. Every gap named in this section closes the moment the next ballot goes live, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Supporting a nominee in a single-shot preseason poll

Because this award asks its question once per edition, support strategies that work in weekly polls need adjusting here. In a weekly player of the week series, such as the Connecticut High School Basketball Player of the Week or the Connecticut High School Football Player of the Week, a weak showing costs a week and the next ballot offers a reset. In this preseason award, the April window is the whole opportunity, and the plan has to fit inside it.

The foundation is the school community itself. The 2025 tally, with 13,435 votes behind the leader, shows that the ballots that win here are the ones that mobilize a real base: teammates, families, alumni, youth baseball leagues and local followers of the paper's coverage. A message that travels through a team group chat, a booster club page and a school's own channels reaches the audience that actually votes in this poll, because that audience is the paper's readership and the nominee's own community.

Timing is the second lever. A preseason poll opens before the season gives voters statistics to lean on, so early votes come from name recognition and offseason reputation. A supporter who waits for the season to produce highlights is waiting past the point where this ballot rewards them. The push should be ready when the ballot opens, not built after it.

Honesty about limits matters as much as effort. The rules on repeat voting are not published ahead of the window, and a push that leans on people voting over and over can backfire if the ballot or the organizer treats that as abuse. The safe framing for any share message is simple: vote for the nominee, share the link, and let the ballot's own rules govern frequency. If the live page states a limit, that limit is the rule; if it is silent, caution is the better read. For a broader look at how supporters grow a vote total within the rules, see our guide on getting more votes online, and for the legal context around paid votes, see our page on whether buying votes is legal.

Finally, keep expectations proportionate. Winning a reader poll is a claim about popularity inside a voting audience, nothing more, and the 2025 result shows a competitive field where the top two names separated by a real but reachable margin. Whatever the goal for the next edition, the first step is the same: find the ballot when The Bulletin publishes it, read its rules as printed, and confirm on the live ballot each cycle.