Who is The Bulletin baseball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Bulletin player of the year vote is and who runs it

This award is a reader-vote feature from The Bulletin, the Connecticut newspaper whose high school sports coverage runs at norwichbulletin.com. Rather than a season-long weekly feature, the ballot poses one question, lists nominated players as the answer options, and hands the decision to the public. Balloting happens on Crowdsignal, the platform behind the paper's poll.fm addresses, at poll.fm/15640394.

The award belongs to the sport vertical and uses a public-vote mechanic: any visitor can pick a nominee and submit. No nomination round appears on the poll page and no judges' component is described beside it. The newspaper publishes the outcome on the same page, showing each nominee's percentage and raw total next to the answer list.

Facts at a glance

Because the nominees are high school players, the description here sticks to publisher, sport and season, never naming an individual nominee, coach or student.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the vote opens

Two editions are on the books: 2022 and 2025. The 2025 ballot is the latest, and its page title carries the marker that the poll has closed, with the final tally left standing. Voting for that cycle fell within June, opening and closing inside the month. Day-level dates never appear on the ballot page, and The Bulletin posts no advance calendar for future editions.

The 2025 tally is the one confirmed figure set for the programme. The leading nominee collected 15,059 votes, a 39 percent share, while the runner-up finished on 7,356 votes, 19 percent. Crowdsignal kept those counts visible while the poll ran and preserves them after closing.

The organizer leaves the fine print unpublished: exact opening and closing dates, any per-supporter limit, and nominee eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The ballot asks one player of the year question instead of running a multi-category slate, so no category roster exists to track, but the rules layer is simply absent from the published page.

How a supporter votes on the Bulletin ballot today

The mechanic is bare-bones. A supporter opens the Crowdsignal ballot, reads the single question, and clicks the answer matching the nominated player he or she wants to back. Submitting registers the choice, and the page refreshes the percentage and count for every nominee. There is no form to complete, no essay, and no separate nomination stage on the published ballot.

Because the 2025 poll closed, that exact ballot no longer takes submissions; it now works as a results page. A supporter today waits for The Bulletin to publish the next edition, which would arrive as a fresh poll in the same series. The paper's sports desk announces its reader votes through coverage at norwichbulletin.com, and the poll.fm link is where actual voting happens once a ballot goes live.

Two practical points follow. First, a vote is one selection among named nominees, so a campaign is about turning out people who will actually click, not about completing anything. Second, Crowdsignal shows live totals, so a close race is visible to every supporter as it develops, and late movement in the percentages is public. What the platform does about duplicate submissions on this specific ballot is not described on the page, so no claim about its filtering should be assumed either way.

How this ballot sits beside its Connecticut siblings

Public-vote sports awards in Connecticut come in two shapes, and this programme belongs to the rarer one. The weekly shape is represented by the baseball player of the week ballot and its counterparts in other sports: the basketball, football, boys lacrosse and girls lacrosse editions, each opening a fresh ballot on a short cycle during its season. This Bulletin award instead delivers a single end-of-season verdict on the whole baseball year, which is why its window is a June event rather than a weekly rhythm.

The other neighbour is the Gatorade football award for Connecticut, a player of the year honour belonging to a national corporate programme rather than a local newsroom. The Bulletin's vote is the opposite in origin: a homegrown newspaper feature, tied to the schools its sports desk actually covers, decided entirely by its own readers.

That origin shapes the ballot's character. Nominees come from The Bulletin's coverage area, the vote lives on the same Crowdsignal platform the paper uses for its reader polls, and the result settles the paper's own all-star conversation. For anyone voting, the practical difference comes down to focus: one concentrated voting window in June, one question, and a result that ends the season's debate instead of resetting every week.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because the ballot is a one-click public poll, support for a nominee is a turnout problem: the campaign that wins is the one that gets the most people in the school community to open the poll.fm link and submit. That means direct asks to teammates, families, classmates and local youth baseball groups, timed inside the short June window, beat any strategy that depends on repeated voting by a small group, especially since The Bulletin publishes no per-supporter rule for this ballot and the live page governs whatever limit actually applies.

The organizer's own position on outside help is missing from the published ballot, so nothing printed there can be cited as permission for automated voting. What is published is the live tally, which makes unusual jumps visible to everyone watching. The safest reading of a newspaper-run vote covering high school athletes is that the paper wants genuine reader participation, and a push that looks like a coordinated real community is both more effective and more defensible than one that does not.

For a fuller playbook that stays inside organizer rules, see the guide to getting more votes online, and for the boundary questions around paid support in any contest, the legality and platform rules page sets out the general position.