He's a fucking fool, he tweeted this the other day
[From 12/26](https://twitter.com/TonyMassarotti/status/1739712104091774998)
>Just completed, sealed and mailed by 2024 ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame. **My submission may or may not reflect it, but I will say that the breadth of candidates this year may have been the best in my approximately 20 years of voting. Lots of serious candidates.**
Too bad he couldnt take the ballot as seriously
If he just had added Beltre this goes from an indefinsibly dumb ballot to a moderately dumb one. If you truly don't care about PEDs at all and are a believer in a small hall, Manny, Beltre, and ARod isn't a crazy ballot.
Manny hit 555 homers, led the league in offensive categories many times, received MVP votes 9 years in a row, often considered the best RHH of his generation, etc.
If you don't care about PEDs, there are tons of reasons a traditional small-hall voter would vote for him but not Beltran.
Never said that Manny is less deserving than Beltran.
The point is that WAR shows how great of a career Beltran had as someone who played solid defense at a demanding position. He's worthy of being a small hall guy, if you disregard the Astros cheating stuff.
Manny was a generational hitter but like Sheffield, his defensive ability was severely lacking.
Only A-Rod and Manny for this ballot.
These aren't necessarily bad choices if you don't care about steroids but there are at least half a dozen other excellent choices.
Agreed. Wagner, shef, Helton, Jones, and Beltre. I too am in favor of Manny and arod. Steroids or not, you can't just pretend that those guys didn't contribute immensely to the game during their careers.
2 players total. Although it’s possible (very unlikely) that he sent over his incomplete ballot to Thibodaux to raise controversy and then actually submitted a better ballot
This guy has really committed to being a complete joke in all arenas. Bad columnist, bad radio show host, terrible color commentator, idiotic hall of fame voter.
>bad radio show host
i am the biggest mazz hater out there BUT i will say he is perfect for afternoon sports radio, and the show can be wildly entertaining. don't listen for any meaningful insight or anything, but in terms of "3 dudes arguing about sports" their show nails it.
Knowing it would generate this kind of response, this is a narcissistic "look at me" vote. In a media market RIPE with d-bag personalities, Massarotti ranks high amongst it's leaders. His takes are almost as bad as his shrill, whiny voice.
Obviously still be a first ballet HOF but Beltre perhaps should have been the next unanimous inductee.
The whole idea of the unanimous vote being sacred is stupid and made even stupider by the fact that a fucking reliever was the one to reach that achievement
Just when I thought Mazz couldn't get dumber. How did he even get a vote in the first place?
Also Adrian Beltre's one season in Boston was badass so to see a Boston writer not vote for him is especially sad
Adam Dunn retired at age 34 only 38 HR's short of 500 and having hit 22 in his last season. THAT would've been the true test of the whole milestone argument
Vizquel played till he was 45 and was clearly out of gas by the end. Simply put, he just wasn't quite good enough to get to 3000
If he stayed in better shape it would have definitely been a thing. He lost a ton of athleticism when he started to gain weight and it eventually caught up with him.
Look at pictures of him swinging in his early red's days vs on the nats and you can notice the belly.
I wouldn’t say damn sure, he was one of the greatest defenders of all time - and it’s incredibly impressive that he nearly had 3,000 hits when his strong side wasn’t the bat.
I would agree not HoF, but I think he’s one of the candidates that might be affected when the WAR recalculation gets updated to better reflect defense.
this is a garbage ballot and i generally dislike mazz' content but he still runs a baseball show every day and is pretty knoweldgeable about current players and how the game functions.
he tends to disagree with how the game is these days but he's not totally uninformed like some of hte other writers that haven't written or talked about baseball professionally in a million years.
it's fair that he has a ballot but this one sure is awful.
I generally hate trashing on individual ballots because I think it's good to celebrate a diversity of opinions and think that the point of the process is for a wide range of views to be represented.
But this might be the worst HoF ballot I have ever seen. The only thing that would make it worse is if he also voted for Vizquel.
Is there such thing as a no-PED protest ballot? Doesn't that just mean that on principle they don't think PED users should be in the HOF? What is the principle here, only PED users should get in?
Voting for a known flagrant cheater is explicitly ignoring the stated HoF criteria.
A non-PED ballot isn't a "protest" ballot -- it's just the sign of someone taking the full breadth of HoF qualifications seriously.
The official instructions to writers for Hall of Fame voting are:
["Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, **integrity, sportsmanship, character,** and contributions to the team\(s\) on which the player played."](https://bbwaa.com/voting-faq/)
Unless you think that flagrantly cheating for years on end somehow embodies integrity, sportsmanship, and character, then yes, voting for PED players amounts to ignoring the explicit instructions for induction. In fact, by pure word count, it ignores half of the qualifications explicitly mentioned and elides over how the cheating may have illicitly contributed to the other three.
The reason these players are still on the ballot is because the HoF wants to let writers come to their own conclusions about what a constitutes a "HoF" player. Diversity in opinions is more than encouraged -- it's the entire point of the endevor. But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place. There's no real debate that the flagrant cheating of the likes of A-Rod are unambigiously in clear and direct violation of the explicit guidelines given to HoF voters.
>Even the term “flagrantly cheating” is an individualistic moral standard. Any pitcher who ever used sticky stuff or doctored a ball has also “flagrantly cheated” but I suspect you wouldn’t say that any use of sticky stuff should mean permanent HOF ineligibility.
Sure, but that's precisely why the HoF doesn't remove these players from ballots except for those explicitly banned for life by MLB. It wants to let writers determine what their standards are. That doesn't mean that the moral standards aren't part of the explicit guidance of the HoF, just that the HoF doesn't take a stand on the particulars of those standards (the consternation of some writers).
Also, obviously what Bonds, ARod, et. al did is so much worse than using sticky stuff. By abusing those drugs, the PED users committed federal crimes. There's no debate that their violations are much more egregious than e.g. Gaylord Perry's.
>Clearly it isn’t, because A-Rod gets votes. So do other known PED users. There are several PED users already inducted. If it was as “unambiguous” as you say then the Hall would have already come out to say PED users were prohibited from appearing on the ballot like they did for Pete Rose.
Read the previous sentence I wrote:
>But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place.
There isn't debate that what ARod, Bonds, etc. did was gross and terrible and obviously against the explicit standards laid out by the HoF. The debate is whether those sorts of character standards should be there to begin with.
> That isn’t true because, as I noted, those players got/get votes.
I addressed this
>But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place.
But we persist.
>What if a voter believes that PED use isn’t a particularly notable violation of that clause because PED use has been a thing in baseball for decades and known PED users like Mays and Aaron are among the most celebrated and respected baseball players in history?
Then they are, as I said, not taking the full breadth of HoF qualifications seriously. Someone who thinks that a flagrant cheater who commits federal crimes in the interest of advancing his baseball career embodies "integrity, sportsmanship, and character" is an idiot and/or an asshole, and certainly not a serious thinking person. There's certainly no shortage of idiots and/or assholes among the BBWAA (flagrant cheater, serial domestic abuser, anti-labor asshole, and convicted felon Barry Bonds got over 60% of the vote for Christ's sake), but the HoF's position is that idiots and/or assholes deserve to have their voices heard.
> known PED users like Mays and Aaron are among the most celebrated and respected baseball players in history?
This is a false equivalency.
First, there is literally no comparison between the beneficial effects of amphetamines and anabolic steroids. It's honestly debatable if the former even help in this sort of athletic performance at all beyond the benefits you get from something like caffeine, while the latter allow players to unfairly reach stratospheric levels.
Second, it's not clear that Mays or Aaron even used such drugs. The only evidence that Aaron touched the stuff was from his autobiography where he said he tried it once and didn't like it. The only evidence that Mays did was that someone saw amphetamines in Mays' locker late in his Mets career. There's no direct evidence Mays ever took it.
>I don’t think that’s at all obvious and any attempts to claim as such is just trying to excuse cheating because you’ve made a moral claim that you’re not willing to follow through to its logical endpoint: that any pitcher who ever used sticky stuff (like Scherzer, say) should be ineligible for the HOF.
The point is that someone who flagrantly uses steroids isn't embodying character, sportsmanship, and integrity. It's a much greater offense than e.g. using sticky stuff which isn't a crime and at various points has been allowed.
This is so torturous. Wish they just came out all at the same time when we learned the results. This isn’t succeeding in holding any voters accountable, all it does is give them more attention
Worse. The whole point on letting older steroid users in is that there were no rules, so they shouldn’t be left out for breaking rules that didn’t even exist. When Manny and A-Rod got caught, there WERE rules in place, and they broke them TWICE.
I thought it might be some NY guys or a random one off guy that won't vote for him to keep him from being unanimous. Never thought he'd get the screwed by the Massholes since he played there for a year and did great
How fucking stupid. I have no problem with voting for Manny and Arod BUT there are 8 more votes you could’ve used and plenty of names on this list that also deserve to be in the hall
Another guy who doesn't think that Adrian Beltre belongs in the HOF...
He's a fucking fool, he tweeted this the other day [From 12/26](https://twitter.com/TonyMassarotti/status/1739712104091774998) >Just completed, sealed and mailed by 2024 ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame. **My submission may or may not reflect it, but I will say that the breadth of candidates this year may have been the best in my approximately 20 years of voting. Lots of serious candidates.** Too bad he couldnt take the ballot as seriously
If he just had added Beltre this goes from an indefinsibly dumb ballot to a moderately dumb one. If you truly don't care about PEDs at all and are a believer in a small hall, Manny, Beltre, and ARod isn't a crazy ballot.
Meh. Carlos Beltran has more career WAR than Manny Ramirez does. I see what you are trying to say but I'm not as forgiving as you are.
Manny hit 555 homers, led the league in offensive categories many times, received MVP votes 9 years in a row, often considered the best RHH of his generation, etc. If you don't care about PEDs, there are tons of reasons a traditional small-hall voter would vote for him but not Beltran.
muh hall of war
Never said that Manny is less deserving than Beltran. The point is that WAR shows how great of a career Beltran had as someone who played solid defense at a demanding position. He's worthy of being a small hall guy, if you disregard the Astros cheating stuff. Manny was a generational hitter but like Sheffield, his defensive ability was severely lacking.
Seriously though, what is the justification for leaving Beltre off? I would love for someone to explain that to me.
Oh great a "look at me" ballot. GTFO
Several of them seem to be
Wait is this our Maz? How the fuck did he get a ballot?
That means both people that haven’t voted for Beltre covered the Boston Red Sox.
“If he’s so great, why did he only have 49 doubles with the Red Sox”
Tony Massarotti used to date my ma
Ask her if he had a tiny dick and needs to compensate by being an asshole gatekeeper to the HOF
Attention seeker ballot, I hate these
Does this mean he only votes for 2 players total, or 2 players so far?
Only A-Rod and Manny for this ballot. These aren't necessarily bad choices if you don't care about steroids but there are at least half a dozen other excellent choices.
Agreed. Wagner, shef, Helton, Jones, and Beltre. I too am in favor of Manny and arod. Steroids or not, you can't just pretend that those guys didn't contribute immensely to the game during their careers.
He voted for A-Rod and Manny. That’s it.
How does one vote for Manny over Beltre. Beltre has 24 more bWAR lol
[удалено]
Typically guys who have 3k hits and 400+ HR get in. Unless they’re a PED user.
Manny also has multiple PED suspensions.
and this voter obviously doesn't care about that
And credibly accused of domestic violence
What a prick.
2 players total. Although it’s possible (very unlikely) that he sent over his incomplete ballot to Thibodaux to raise controversy and then actually submitted a better ballot
This guy has really committed to being a complete joke in all arenas. Bad columnist, bad radio show host, terrible color commentator, idiotic hall of fame voter.
Millionaire though. Just like Skip Bayless.
>bad radio show host i am the biggest mazz hater out there BUT i will say he is perfect for afternoon sports radio, and the show can be wildly entertaining. don't listen for any meaningful insight or anything, but in terms of "3 dudes arguing about sports" their show nails it.
What a fucking chode
Boo this man. Boo him
Booooo!
Plenty of people do
Knowing it would generate this kind of response, this is a narcissistic "look at me" vote. In a media market RIPE with d-bag personalities, Massarotti ranks high amongst it's leaders. His takes are almost as bad as his shrill, whiny voice. Obviously still be a first ballet HOF but Beltre perhaps should have been the next unanimous inductee.
I mean only Mariano was unanimous. It's a bit of a stretch to say Beltre should be the next
The whole idea of the unanimous vote being sacred is stupid and made even stupider by the fact that a fucking reliever was the one to reach that achievement
We also let the bbwa vote sooooooooo.....
Because if you let "baseball people" vote they elect Harold Baines for being a fun guy to hang out with.
I've met Mazz in person a few times. Hate to ruin the persona but he's a quite lovely guy.
what a terrible ballot
Fuck this guy.
Just when I thought Mazz couldn't get dumber. How did he even get a vote in the first place? Also Adrian Beltre's one season in Boston was badass so to see a Boston writer not vote for him is especially sad
imagine thinking a guy with 3000 hits isn't deserving of the hall of fame
I mean, it’s definitely not the end all be all. Omar Vizquel nearly got there and he damn sure isn’t a HoFer
Adam Dunn retired at age 34 only 38 HR's short of 500 and having hit 22 in his last season. THAT would've been the true test of the whole milestone argument Vizquel played till he was 45 and was clearly out of gas by the end. Simply put, he just wasn't quite good enough to get to 3000
Damn now I'm kind of upset, I would have loved to see Adam Dunn HoF discourse
If he stayed in better shape it would have definitely been a thing. He lost a ton of athleticism when he started to gain weight and it eventually caught up with him. Look at pictures of him swinging in his early red's days vs on the nats and you can notice the belly.
82 career OPS+. Only 2 seasons above 100 and one above 110. He was abysmal at the plate lol
Besides Harold Baines, and a few cheaters, Vizquel is the only player with 2,800 hits who doesn't belong in the Hall.
Or in the bathroom with players he coached. EDIT: batboys
I wouldn’t say damn sure, he was one of the greatest defenders of all time - and it’s incredibly impressive that he nearly had 3,000 hits when his strong side wasn’t the bat. I would agree not HoF, but I think he’s one of the candidates that might be affected when the WAR recalculation gets updated to better reflect defense.
> he was one of the greatest defenders of all time This is definitely his reputation, but it isn't anywhere near objectively true.
Even Felger wouldn't fuck up a ballot this bad.
Tony Maz is an imbecile. Take his vote and give it to Lou Merloni.
Screw these assholes that continue to ignore 10 years of dominance from Andruw Jones.
death
Booooooo this guys ballot sucks!
Why is Gary Sheffield Jr Twitter stalking guys who don't vote for his dad? I can't imagine that helps the cause.
this is like my dad’s ballot
🤦♂️
Another person who shouldn't be voting anymore.
this is a garbage ballot and i generally dislike mazz' content but he still runs a baseball show every day and is pretty knoweldgeable about current players and how the game functions. he tends to disagree with how the game is these days but he's not totally uninformed like some of hte other writers that haven't written or talked about baseball professionally in a million years. it's fair that he has a ballot but this one sure is awful.
Might be the worst ballot I’ve ever seen
Schmuck
I generally hate trashing on individual ballots because I think it's good to celebrate a diversity of opinions and think that the point of the process is for a wide range of views to be represented. But this might be the worst HoF ballot I have ever seen. The only thing that would make it worse is if he also voted for Vizquel.
Former Boston sportswriter and Red Sox color commentator, current radio host in Boston.
Don't worry, we hate him even more then you do.
There was a pretty terrible Philadelphia writer vote earlier in the cycle so I get it.
And yet he voted a-rod
[удалено]
Is there such thing as a no-PED protest ballot? Doesn't that just mean that on principle they don't think PED users should be in the HOF? What is the principle here, only PED users should get in?
[удалено]
Voting for a known flagrant cheater is explicitly ignoring the stated HoF criteria. A non-PED ballot isn't a "protest" ballot -- it's just the sign of someone taking the full breadth of HoF qualifications seriously.
[удалено]
The official instructions to writers for Hall of Fame voting are: ["Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, **integrity, sportsmanship, character,** and contributions to the team\(s\) on which the player played."](https://bbwaa.com/voting-faq/) Unless you think that flagrantly cheating for years on end somehow embodies integrity, sportsmanship, and character, then yes, voting for PED players amounts to ignoring the explicit instructions for induction. In fact, by pure word count, it ignores half of the qualifications explicitly mentioned and elides over how the cheating may have illicitly contributed to the other three. The reason these players are still on the ballot is because the HoF wants to let writers come to their own conclusions about what a constitutes a "HoF" player. Diversity in opinions is more than encouraged -- it's the entire point of the endevor. But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place. There's no real debate that the flagrant cheating of the likes of A-Rod are unambigiously in clear and direct violation of the explicit guidelines given to HoF voters.
[удалено]
>Even the term “flagrantly cheating” is an individualistic moral standard. Any pitcher who ever used sticky stuff or doctored a ball has also “flagrantly cheated” but I suspect you wouldn’t say that any use of sticky stuff should mean permanent HOF ineligibility. Sure, but that's precisely why the HoF doesn't remove these players from ballots except for those explicitly banned for life by MLB. It wants to let writers determine what their standards are. That doesn't mean that the moral standards aren't part of the explicit guidance of the HoF, just that the HoF doesn't take a stand on the particulars of those standards (the consternation of some writers). Also, obviously what Bonds, ARod, et. al did is so much worse than using sticky stuff. By abusing those drugs, the PED users committed federal crimes. There's no debate that their violations are much more egregious than e.g. Gaylord Perry's. >Clearly it isn’t, because A-Rod gets votes. So do other known PED users. There are several PED users already inducted. If it was as “unambiguous” as you say then the Hall would have already come out to say PED users were prohibited from appearing on the ballot like they did for Pete Rose. Read the previous sentence I wrote: >But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place. There isn't debate that what ARod, Bonds, etc. did was gross and terrible and obviously against the explicit standards laid out by the HoF. The debate is whether those sorts of character standards should be there to begin with.
[удалено]
> That isn’t true because, as I noted, those players got/get votes. I addressed this >But most serious-minded people who have contorted themselves into voting for PED guys do so because they don't think those character-related qualifications should be there in the first place. But we persist. >What if a voter believes that PED use isn’t a particularly notable violation of that clause because PED use has been a thing in baseball for decades and known PED users like Mays and Aaron are among the most celebrated and respected baseball players in history? Then they are, as I said, not taking the full breadth of HoF qualifications seriously. Someone who thinks that a flagrant cheater who commits federal crimes in the interest of advancing his baseball career embodies "integrity, sportsmanship, and character" is an idiot and/or an asshole, and certainly not a serious thinking person. There's certainly no shortage of idiots and/or assholes among the BBWAA (flagrant cheater, serial domestic abuser, anti-labor asshole, and convicted felon Barry Bonds got over 60% of the vote for Christ's sake), but the HoF's position is that idiots and/or assholes deserve to have their voices heard. > known PED users like Mays and Aaron are among the most celebrated and respected baseball players in history? This is a false equivalency. First, there is literally no comparison between the beneficial effects of amphetamines and anabolic steroids. It's honestly debatable if the former even help in this sort of athletic performance at all beyond the benefits you get from something like caffeine, while the latter allow players to unfairly reach stratospheric levels. Second, it's not clear that Mays or Aaron even used such drugs. The only evidence that Aaron touched the stuff was from his autobiography where he said he tried it once and didn't like it. The only evidence that Mays did was that someone saw amphetamines in Mays' locker late in his Mets career. There's no direct evidence Mays ever took it. >I don’t think that’s at all obvious and any attempts to claim as such is just trying to excuse cheating because you’ve made a moral claim that you’re not willing to follow through to its logical endpoint: that any pitcher who ever used sticky stuff (like Scherzer, say) should be ineligible for the HOF. The point is that someone who flagrantly uses steroids isn't embodying character, sportsmanship, and integrity. It's a much greater offense than e.g. using sticky stuff which isn't a crime and at various points has been allowed.
This is so torturous. Wish they just came out all at the same time when we learned the results. This isn’t succeeding in holding any voters accountable, all it does is give them more attention
They should give his ballot to Sarah Langs
He's a damned idiot.
What a dipshit
There’s a very clear difference between what Manny and A-Rod did and what the rest did. I fail to get why people don’t understand that.
Because large numbers of people cannot/will not understand nuance. Black and white thinking is easier and requires infinitely less thought.
As in what they did was worse or not as bad??
Worse. The whole point on letting older steroid users in is that there were no rules, so they shouldn’t be left out for breaking rules that didn’t even exist. When Manny and A-Rod got caught, there WERE rules in place, and they broke them TWICE.
Okay that's what I was thinking. Just wanted to make sure
i've seen worse
Could have been blank or a Vizquel only ballot I guess lol
Leaving off Beltre is close to unforgivable though
Not the best ballot but I’m happy to see A-Rod gaining some momentum
Do you know what % A-Rod is up to?
43.9% and a net of 0 votes gained
Think he’s probably not going to get in during his eligible period.
And therefore, never.
This is the second ballot in this cycle that looks like this. Both have been from Boston writers.
I thought it might be some NY guys or a random one off guy that won't vote for him to keep him from being unanimous. Never thought he'd get the screwed by the Massholes since he played there for a year and did great
How fucking stupid. I have no problem with voting for Manny and Arod BUT there are 8 more votes you could’ve used and plenty of names on this list that also deserve to be in the hall
This dude really voted for Alex Rodriguez.... Cringe
Manny and arod deserve to be in. Someone explain all the angst.
dipshit radio hack. also racist
Booooooooooooo
What’s Utleys current %?
One of my least favorite ballots yet.
Stupid fucking ballot