(This is probably the most Saccaro tweet ever.)
A while back, I thought it would be fun to put together a flowchart called “How You Can Tell If It’s Matt Saccaro Tweeting From the CagePotato Account.” There would be a series of questions like…
– Is @CagePotatoMMA live-tweeting a Bellator event?
– Does the tweeter use “heh” to signify amusement, rather than the more common “LOL” or “haha”?
– Is this a hot-take, calmly delivered in question form?
– Is the tweeter mentioning what food he’s eating while watching the fights?
– And would you describe that food as “disgusting”?
– Is the tweet so off-topic that you wonder if the tweeter just forgot to switch back to his personal account?
– Does he later apologize for the tweet, saying that this is the kind of stuff he thinks about when he’s in a reflective/melancholy/pensive mood?
And basically, all YES answers would eventually lead to “Yeah, it’s probably Saccaro.” If you’ve followed CagePotato on twitter over the last year or so, you’d probably appreciate it. But then I got distracted, and I put the idea on the backburner, figuring I could always do it some other time. Saccaro-humor isn’t going out of style, right? He’ll always be here!
Life, of course, operates on its own schedule. The people you depend on the most are simply gone one day, and then what do you do? I don’t know what you do. I guess what I’m trying to say is, go hug your kids, go hug your parents, go hug your best friends, and if you have any beef with anybody from ten years ago that’s over nothing, man, tell them you’re sorry and you love them, because you never know what’s gonna happen, man.
A couple weeks ago, Matt Saccaro — CagePotato’s weekend editor and associate social media editor (aka, lead-tweeter) since Fall 2013 — put in his notice that he would be leaving CagePotato, as he had accepted a job as the new assistant social media editor at Salon.com. If you know Matt, you know that this is pretty much a dream job for him, so go congratulate him.
I’d like to think that Salon was wowed by Matt’s UFC-themed Magic the Gathering cards, or his work on the 95 Theses of MMA, or any of his various articles calling bullshit on Zuffa mythmaking. But the truth is, Matt writes for genuinely legitimate media outlets when he’s not slumming it on the mid-level cage-fighting blog you’re reading right now, and has even written a damn book. It’s possible that we never really deserved him in the first place.
Nevertheless, I was psyched when Saccaro first reached out to me in May 2013, looking to contribute, because I had already read and enjoyed his MMA work on BleacherReport. His first article for CagePotato was this post about Luke Cummo’s new-found hatred of MMA (and Cummo’s idea for a point-fighting martial arts tournament called League of Assassins). Matt followed this up with articles about the pathetic hooks that the UFC has used to sell PPVs, and some hypothetical re-arrangements of the UFC’s early tournament brackets. He was a doom & gloom guy with hot takes that blurred the lines between truth-telling and trolling. He was a ferocious thinker, a creator of alternate universes, a defender of free speech and gender equality. Did I mention that he was a doom & gloom guy? It seems worth mentioning twice, although when MMA was awesome, he cheered harder than anyone. He remains the only MMA writer to film a Dude Wipes unboxing video. And yet he was never nominated for MMA Journalist of the Year? Bull, shit.
So yeah, Matt Saccaro is leaving us. His last day is tomorrow, and I can’t thank him enough for the amazing work he’s done for us over the last year and a half, and for all the times he inspired me as an editor. Matt did so much to shape the voice of this particular era of CagePotato, and his impact will be felt for a long time, probably as long as CagePotato exists. You can thank him here. Saccaro might stop by here and there in the future (I hope), but for now, let’s remember him fondly. I’ll end this tribute with some of his greatest off-topic tweets that I randomly screen-capped…
