Chillicothe Gazette preseason baseball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Chillicothe Gazette preseason baseball player of the year is

This fan vote for high school baseball is run by the Chillicothe Gazette, the daily newspaper serving Chillicothe, Ohio. The ballot asks readers to pick the player they expect to be the standout of the coming season, which is what separates a preseason award from an award earned on results already played. Supporters judge expectations, returning form and reputation rather than a box score.

The voting form is hosted on Crowdsignal and served through the poll.fm address, a platform widely used by regional newspapers for reader polls. The confirmed ballot for this program sits at poll.fm/15238332, and the nominee list on that ballot draws from school communities around Chillicothe, including Adena, Chillicothe, Huntington, Paint Valley, Piketon, Southeastern, Unioto and Waverly.

Facts at a glance

Because the Gazette is a newspaper, the program sits inside its sports coverage rather than inside a standalone contest site. That matters for supporters: the paper promotes the ballot through its own sports desk, and the audience is the paper's local readership in Ross County and the surrounding communities rather than a national voting pool.

The dated record for this baseball vote

The program has confirmed runs in 2023 and 2025. Both fall in the preseason slot, before Ohio high school baseball seasons get underway, and the 2025 edition is the better documented of the pair because its full voting window is known: voting was open from March 25 through April 4, 2025. That gives supporters a window of roughly a fortnight, which is far longer than the weekly cycles the paper's metropolitan counterparts run.

The 2025 ballot produced a closely watched race at the top. The leading nominee, representing Piketon, finished with 32,987 votes, a 39 percent share of the total logged on the poll. The runner-up, from Huntington, held 28,024 votes at 33 percent. Those totals make this one of the higher-turnout high school polls in the region for a market the size of Chillicothe, and they show how far a motivated school community can carry a nominee in a preseason format.

Several facts about the program are not published anywhere the organizer maintains. No category list and no per-supporter limit appear on the ballot the Gazette publishes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whether an edition ran in 2024 is likewise not stated by the publisher, and the dates of the next preseason window follow the same rule: the live ballot is the only source that can settle them.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic is deliberately simple. A supporter opens the ballot at the poll.fm address during the published window, reads the nominee list, selects the radio button beside the chosen player and submits the form. Crowdsignal logs the response immediately and then displays the running results, so a supporter who has just voted can see exactly where the race stands.

There is no account requirement described for this ballot. The poll form does not ask supporters to register, log in or pay anything, which keeps the barrier to entry low and explains the five-figure vote totals the 2025 edition produced. A supporter needs nothing more than the link and a moment to choose.

What the ballot does not spell out is the repeat-voting rule. The Gazette has not published how often a single supporter may return during the window, and Crowdsignal polls can be configured in several different ways on that point. The live form is the authority: whatever response settings the current edition carries are visible on the ballot page itself, and supporters should follow them rather than assume a daily return is permitted.

Timing matters more on this ballot than on a weekly one. Because the whole award is decided inside a single preseason window, a push that starts after the closing date contributes nothing. Supporters planning to rally their school community should do it early, while every share and every ask still lands inside the open window.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ohio has a dense pack of publisher-run fan votes, and this program differs from most of them on frequency. The Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week, the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week all run as weekly cycles through the school year, resetting the ballot every few days. The Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week follow the same weekly shape, and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote is a television-station award with a season-long frame.

The Chillicothe Gazette ballot instead opens once, before the baseball season, and closes when the preseason window ends. That changes the campaign arithmetic for a nominee's supporters: there is no fresh start each week, so the whole effort concentrates into a single stretch in March and April.

Scale differs too. The metropolitan programs draw on large urban readerships, while this ballot serves the communities around Chillicothe, where school loyalty runs deep and a single nominee's network can genuinely move the result, as the 2025 totals showed.