Surprisingly It's Not Muscular Fan Struggles With Water Bottle

January 14, 2024 7:57 AM

Baseball And The Algorithm: The MLB YouTube channel has posted 291,289 videos. If you had to guess what happens in the video with the very most views, what would you say?
posted by imabanana (31 comments total)

Per the article, this is the answer: title not included to let you still guess
posted by miguelcervantes at 8:19 AM on January 14 [4 favorites]

There is something so soothing about the sound of a baseball announcer's voice over the roar of a crowd. It's like the game was made for radio.
posted by eagles123 at 8:20 AM on January 14 [6 favorites]

We are all muscular fan struggling with water bottle.

This was a good read - would recommend to those even with no knowledge of baseball - which is an irony you’ll only understand by reading the article.
posted by q*ben at 8:22 AM on January 14 [4 favorites]

Excellent article. Best of the web, indeed
posted by NoMich at 8:22 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]

That was an absolutely fascinating read! I spend time wondering why I get recommended things by YouTube, and this doesn't explain my thing but it explains the thing. I'm so glad you posted it!
posted by hippybear at 8:32 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]

It also isn’t “fan contemplating a plate of beans.”

Wait actually it is.
posted by notyou at 8:33 AM on January 14

Interestingly the video was showing me it had 4.86 million views which I thought kinda low. Scrolling down a half dozen of MLB's videos had more views but clicking through would also say they had 4.86 million views regardless of number shown previously. Something weird going on in the interface.
posted by Mitheral at 8:35 AM on January 14

4.86M is the number of subscribers the channel has— the video linked above had 29M views.
posted by profreader at 8:38 AM on January 14 [3 favorites]

it's only #1 because MLB hasn't posted video from 10 cent beer night, the cowards
posted by logicpunk at 8:39 AM on January 14 [4 favorites]

Will there be a cat?
posted by Czjewel at 8:39 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]

In a better world, #1 would be the Pirates' comedy of errors during a Cubs game that turned what would have usually been your standard ground out into a double and a stolen run.
posted by gtrwolf at 8:50 AM on January 14 [13 favorites]

I went in guessing that the answer would be "Randy Johnson vs. the Bird" or maybe "Fan turns Hot Dog Into Straw" but I guess the whole point is that I never would have guessed this.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:13 AM on January 14 [6 favorites]

Random beats algorithm! Where I used to work had one of half a dozen Copyright Libraries in the British Isles, authorised to request a copy of any and every book published in these islands. That's a LOT of books: about 200,000 each year. In the basement of our Library is a section where the books, which have been acquired under the rules of copyright, are shelved after being catalogued but before they’re shipped out to a warehouse out near the Airport. At any one time there might be 2-3 thousand titles on these stacks. They are shelved by accession number - as they came in – rather than by author or subject. It’s wonderful down there: an Aladdin’s cave of treasure peppered through the dross of hydrodynamics, Hogwarts, and history. I often used to dive down there to choose my weekend reading and always surfaced with an oyster and occasionally a pearl.

This may seem to be an irrelevant baseball-free de-rail. To which I say "Sacrifice Bunt!"
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:22 AM on January 14 [5 favorites]

There's probably some really enticing gradient in the data, whether real or not, that says "Step 1: get this group of people, with this set of interests, hooked on the videos watched by this other group of people. Step 2: ... Step 3: ad impressions JACKPOT"
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:40 AM on January 14

Personal favorite is this melee from a Blue Jays, Rangers game
It's especially fun because it's a red team vs a blue team. And especially confusing when you see the large melee, because a lot of the benched red team is wearing blue jackets but with red hats.
Specifically the slow motion shot of the first punch thrown.
posted by shenkerism at 11:00 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]

I do not follow baseball at all, but I really enjoyed this article! It had some interesting things to say about algorithms and the unmediated pre internet life.

Also I had never seen the muscular fan and water bottle video and his struggles made me feel better about myself and my pipe cleaner arms.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:30 AM on January 14

from the article: Many were from people who were mystified at how they had ended up exposed to this video.

This morning I followed a link to a short clip from a French art film. At the end, YouTube tried to autoplay a WWE wrestling video. I have never watched a wrestling video and have never let YouTube choose a video for me.
posted by neuron at 12:32 PM on January 14

I wouldn't be surprised if MLB didn't post it, but I was hoping #1 would be Trump choking back tears while getting booed a few years back.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:10 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

My first thought was Randy Johnson and the bird, but given that was a pre-season game and an unfortunate avian sacrifice to the gods of randomness - I don’t see the MLB really pushing that one.

As a Red Sox fan, my most viewed video is still “Here comes the Pizzah” but that’s definitely a regional speciality.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:26 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]

I am very surprised it did not involve a dog.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:32 PM on January 14

I have to assume the video is stuck in a runaway feedback loop at this point:

- video has tons of views
- therefore recommend it heavily
- thereby getting it more views
- repeat

It’s virality but not how we usually think about it. It’s like a quantum phenomenon where the act of observing it causes it to happen.

Reminds me of the escalating Amazon book prices, where two bots would get stuck raising prices a penny over each other until some uninteresting book was priced at $1,000,000.
posted by dbx at 2:33 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]

I thought it was kind of an okay article with a punchline that wasn't really a punchline. Then I come back to the thread here and everyone's going on about how it's such a great article, and I'm wondering what I missed.

The lesson here is whoever started the trend of inserting random unrelated blurbs or promos in the middle of an article that make it look like the article is finished, when in fact you've actually only read 15% of the article, has done an incredible disservice to the internet. It's been a while since I got punked quite this badly but it happens more than it should.

(The other 85% was indeed pretty interesting though, and I'm glad I went back to read it after assuming it didn't exist!)
posted by chrominance at 4:14 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

Knowing nothing about what they have and haven't posted, I would have guessed Evan Longoria's Catch saves Reporter's Life!, but it's only 21M views (and not on their channel).
posted by krisjohn at 4:25 PM on January 14

drewbage1847: "here comes the pizza!" was my guess too, and I'm not even a Sox fan.

For the uninitiated, here's a retelling of the most Boston of sports fans sagas.
posted by martin q blank at 4:28 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

So, fun things about baseball and television --

The game is super slow so cameramen have ages to scan the crowd for small human moments playing out.

The game is super slow but there are camera things going on so the announcers on televised baseball are MUCH more ASMR slow and low toned than the ones on radio.

On radio they'll be doing non-stop chatter full of stats and trivial and other things while on television they can take pauses of several seconds that are full of stadium atmosphere.

Weird fun fact: when I was living in Phoenix in the early 2000s, the Diamondbacks had a contract with a local non-network channel to broadcast some HUGE number of the D'backs' games -- maybe 110 out of the regular season? Anyway, when the games were happening at home, they'd still be broadcast and they had this setup in that stadium specifically for broadcasting surround sound. This is 1998-2001 or so, so primitive surround tech, but over the air surround sound broadcasting with whatever the best picture was at the time.

The sound picture would be that in a 5.1 home theater setup, the 4 surround channels would be entirely the stadium surround sound picture, and it was deep and immersive and really felt like being in a ballpark. This included the in-stadium announcements. The Center channel was the on-air broadcast team, which were quite a bit louder than the other channels so if you had your settings normal, you just had announcers talking to you from your television while you had the sounds of the ballpark happening around you. It was a nice presentation.

And even nicer presentation was to go into the home theater settings and turn off the center channel entirely and turn up the volume on the setup. Now you're in a 4.1 surround sound setting, the ballpark surround sound, with no television announcers. It was an AMAZING thing to discover.

I lived only about 4 miles from the ballpark and at that time you could buy impulse tickets to see games in cheap or even middle seats for pretty cheap. So I saw a lot of games that season live in the stadium. But it was even more great that I could feel like I was in the stadium sitting at home just by turning off one channel of my surround system and cranking the background volume.
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]

I was expecting the most popular baseball video to involve someone getting whacked in the crotch.
posted by egypturnash at 4:59 PM on January 14

You're thinking of Football In The Groin.
posted by krisjohn at 5:11 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]

Sabo's bat had cork, but Football in the Groin had football in the groin...
posted by Navelgazer at 5:30 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

This was a slightly strange read, and I really hope YT doesn’t think I care but baseball videos now.
posted by teece303 at 5:59 PM on January 14

I will say one thing about the YT algorithm... there are some things that are more "sticky" within it than others.

Like sometimes I can spend an entire day researching a band or an album, searching for a bunch of content and watching a lot of it, but none of that will stick in my timeline. It seems to know when research is happening and doesn't put that in your watch habits.

But other times... like I can watch a ton of videos on one-off topics of various things, but then there will that ONE which sticks and suddenly every fifth video in my recommendations will be related to that. It feels overwhelming when it happens.

I don't know what criteria need to be met for a video to be sticky... does it have to do with a specific video or with a watch pattern of mine and if it's a specific video does that mean it sticks to everyone who watches it or was it me and the video reacted together in YT's bowels to cause this to happen?

It's just so peculiar sometimes.
posted by hippybear at 6:30 PM on January 14

> Evan Longoria's Catch saves Reporter's Life! , but it's only 21M views (and not on their channel).

Probably because it was staged. It took him 10 years at admit it, though.
posted by WaylandSmith at 7:58 PM on January 14