It started as an idea while I was shoveling last Monday and turned into an 8-day voting extravaganza that turned into a ‘social media war’, as someone described to me.
There’s millions of awards given to players but why not the coaches? I was curious to see what our audience thinks, so I began with a vote of ‘best hitting instructor’ on Long Island. I asked for recommendations and took the top 32 candidates and turned it into an NCAA style bracket. Clearly, some very good instructors were not included if they don’t happen to utilize social media and for that I apologize.
As for the bracket, the final four featured Frank Catalanotto, Ryan Pembroke, Anthony Passalacqua and Joe Francisco. The upset in the previous round was Ryan Pembroke over Keith Osik. To be clear, the voting is not indicative of our views or opinions of candidates, simply a contest for the audience and obviously some fanbases are more passionate about contests than others.
In the Final 4, Francisco pulled off the upset over Catalanotto and Passalacqua defeated Pembroke to advance to the finals. In the finals, the excitement reached another dimension. Passalacqua was ahead from 6am until about 8pm, with seemingly an unending amount of votes coming on. Francisco’s army took over and put their guy ahead for good and wound up with 4,095 votes to Passalacqua’s 3,944. It was thrilling and it was encouraging to see everyone rallying behind it. I gained roughly 800 followers in the week and was tagged in about 30 IG Stories from followers encouraging their followers to vote in just the final day.
All told, it was pretty cool to see everyone’s competitive spirit. I received a text from a couple people thanking me for including them and stated that it helped them reconnect with former players and teammates from decades ago which is really great to hear.
We will have Francisco on a podcast tomorrow to discuss, and also it will be the first day of the pitching instructor category.
