Baseball And The Algorithm

A parable of modern life.

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?

If this helps: The second-most-viewed video is called Muscular Fan Struggles With Water Bottle.

If this further helps, the nos. 3 though 50 most-viewed videos include:

• 12 other videos of fans, usually interacting with foul balls—either a catch made while holding a baby, or a person snaking a foul ball from another fan, or a person giving their foul ball to a different fan, or some twist on one of those.

• 8 videos of on-field brawls, if we include Tommy Lasorda beating on the Phillie Phanatic as a brawl.

• 5 videos of celebrities singing the National Anthem or throwing out a first pitch.

So more than half are fans, fights or famous folks. There are ~16 involving real baseball action:

• four are either full games or highlight reels from this year’s WBC,

• three are pitchers getting hit by line-drive comebackers,

• three are long throws by outfielders,

• two are best-plays-of-the-year packages,

• one is Pat Venditte’s switch-pitching debut,

and a few others.

If I had had to guess what the no. 1 video is, I’d have probably guessed either “The Steve Bartman incident” or “Robin Ventura, Nolan Ryan duke it out,” but those are merely 85^th (with 3.1 million views) and 24^th (with 7.3 million), respectively. If I had to guess again, I’d have guessed “2008 WS Gm 3: Taylor Swift sings the national anthem,” but that’s just 393^rd, with 1.1 million views. Clearly, I’m not thinking big enough. What’s 27 times more popular than Taylor Swift singing?

The answer is:

Chris Sabo, corking his bat, 28 years ago.

Huh.

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Chris Sabo was the third of five big leaguers who’ve been suspended for using a corked bat. It wasn’t Sabo’s bat. It had his teammate Hal Morris’ name on it, but Morris said (per newspaper articles at the time) he had quit using that bat brand years earlier and so had given the bats to some teammate pitchers. Sometimes players cork bats to use in batting practice for fun, apparently, and maybe that happened to one of these abandoned Hal Morris bats. Sabo said he found that particular bat in a storage closet. A bat boy brought it out to him, and the first time he swung it the bat cracked. Sabo peered down at it but couldn’t find the crack, so he used it for another pitch—not the sort of paranoia we’d expect from a corker. He probably didn’t know. On his next swing the bat exploded and cork flew out onto the field. Whoops.

He got a seven-game suspension. Reds GM Jim Bowden made a fuss about integrity and vowed to x-ray every bat of every Reds player. Sabo served his suspension without appeal. He batted three more times in the majors after the corked bat, striking out all three times, and then he retired. It’s not a very interesting story.

It’s not a very interesting video. I pride myself on my close-watching skills, but I’ve watched this video probably 10 times and found nothing worth screengrabbing or making a GIF of. There are more than 10,000 YouTube comments on it, a few thousand of which I’ve read, and very few interesting observations about this video have been relayed in any of those comments. Several close-watch commenters note that there’s a kid in the stands wearing a basketball jersey… at a baseball game! That counts as an interesting detail in a video this uninteresting. “Go back to 2:10 and the umpire in the back was rubbing his nipple,” somebody says. That’s as good as this video gets. A bunch of people comment that Chris Sabo looks like Vin Diesel. No he doesn’t, but we’re all out here trying our best to react appropriately to major league baseball’s most popular video of all-time. 

Sammy Sosa was also caught using a corked bat, under broadly similar circumstances. His bat broke, there was a cork carve-out down the middle of it, Sosa said it was a batting practice bat slipped into a game by accident, he got suspended. Sosa is way more famous than Chris Sabo. His corking was a much bigger story (Sosa’s integrity being a controversial topic of late-1990s/early-2000s baseball), and it is also historically significant, as the last MLB corking to date. The video of that incident has 250,000 views, 1 percent of what Chris Sabo’s corking has.

Huh.

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We can’t track this video’s views by date, but we can track its comments by date, which probably serves as a good proxy for views. The biggest year for this video was 2021, seven years after it was posted on YouTube and 15 years after Sabo retired.

It’s not like it was consistently popular throughout 2021, though. In a one-week period in October 2021, about 6.3 million people¹ watched this video, which would mean that more people watched Sabo Breaks Bat in that one week than have watched all but 29 MLB videos across all time. In its most popular single day—October 15, 2021—about 1.5 million people watched it.

Most of the comments that day fell under four categories:

1. Many were apparently from the United Kingdom, with references to cricket or rounders or the sign-off “cheers.”

2. Many were from people who were openly hostile toward baseball and/or had no idea what corking a bat was, or how it helped hitters, or why it’s against the rules, or how baseball works:

3. Many were from people who were mystified at how they had ended up exposed to this video. The comments make it clear that the people who watched it hadn’t clicked on a link in an article or on social media or knowingly been directed to it by some influencer with enormous reach. Rather, they’d been offered it by YouTube’s recommendations algorithm. It had shown up in their suggested videos. Dozens of comments that day along the lines of:

4. Other dozens referred to a manga series/anime series/media franchise called One Piece, sometimes using words that I had to look up:

There’s a character named Sabo in One Piece. That, more than anything else, seems to be what led this video to lots of these people. The YouTube algorithm confused several million people’s interest in an anime series with interest in the 1988 National League Rookie of the Year.

Huh!

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There’s a lot about this that strikes me as funny, baffling, disorienting, or just excessively modern.

Here’s something funny: Chris Sabo was paid $200,000 to play the 1996 season, minus the seven days’ salary when he was suspended. According to most estimates of how much YouTube creators get paid per view, this video has probably generated around $500,000, assuming MLB is monetizing its channel through YouTube’s partner program.

Here’s something baffling: Yes, there is a character named Sabo in One Piece. But he’s not a main character or a household name, and he’s not even named on the One Piece Wikipedia page. It’s not like this is a video of a baseball player named Chris Harry Potter. I scoured YouTube for any Sabo-titled video that had anywhere near the reach of this Chris Sabo-titled video, and I couldn’t find one. So whatever connection the YouTube algorithm was making wasn’t as simple as “You watched this Sabo video so you’ll watch this other Sabo video, I’m just a stupid machine.” There had to be some bank-shot logic that drew in lots of anime fans, not just Sabo-from-One-Piece fans.

Here’s something disorienting: A couple weeks after this burst of comments, there were zero comments. Not “it was down to a trickle per day,” but the actual number zero. There were… let’s see, starting on Nov. 1, 2021 there were a total of nine comments in the final 61 days of the year, including two two-week periods with none at all. What that tells us is that this video has essentially no organic interest. When the algorithm abandons it, it gets almost literally no traffic.

So the YouTube algorithm can make millions of views happen anytime it wants, even for a video that has no actual interest to anybody. Even more extraordinarily, it can do so among the people (British anime fans who disdain baseball) who have the very least interest in this no-interest video. No opposites are too powerful for the algorithm to bridge.

Some version of what happened in mid-October 2021 happens for the Sabo video one to three times every year. The algorithm suddenly flips the switch for it, and a bunch of people suddenly get pushed to watch it. The video bubbles up for a couple weeks, then burbles down, and the commenters make Haki jokes and wonder why they’re all there at all.

Here’s something excessively modern: “Geez people,” a commenter in April 2020 wrote in response to the baseball-disdaining anime fans in the comments, “just because it’s in your recommendations doesn’t mean you have to watch it.” That’s true, technically. And yet… only to a point.

One of the people who watched this video in October 2021 is a guy I contacted named David Fishman. David and I couldn’t figure out why he got recommended this video: He does not follow anime, he hasn’t watched any YouTube videos about One Piece, he’s not a baseball fan, he doesn’t even live in the United Kingdom, though he does live abroad. It’s a real mystery, but some kind of mistake happened, because he had no interest in the video. I was struck by the comment he left on it:

Would love to know why YT has been recommending me this video at least once a day for what feels like months.

The algorithm didn’t just recommend this video to him. It insisted. It held him hostage to it. Finally, as David told me, he concluded that “the view count was huge, so maybe it was really cool.” He watched it. It was not really cool. The whole video “was just weird to me. I have no context, no knowledge of who the player is, and it's a specific scenario that you have to follow baseball to appreciate.” To be honest, David, even if you follow baseball there’s not that much to appreciate.

Sometimes the algorithm seems all-knowing; sometimes, it couldn’t be dumber; and sometimes there’s serendipity in the middle, but it always gets its way.

David, predictably, got served a bunch of baseball video recommendations after he finally gave in to Sabo. He still didn’t follow baseball, which meant these recommendations were still wildly off the mark—but one of them appealed to him. It was a compilation of high-IQ baseball plays. “I'm always interested in seeing people performing at their peak,” he told me. He clicked on it. That one, he said, was fine.

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So, to summarize: The most popular YouTube video produced by a century of televised baseball is a clip that became huge only by an accident caused by a glitch in an algorithm that simply will not stop pushing until you give in to its mistake. (The second most popular is of a defective water bottle.)

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Before the algorithm, as I recall it, people just sort of stumbled around bumping into a lot of their experiences. Life was a lot of time spent on long car drives with a only one clear radio station, or in the waiting room with nothing to read but travel magazines, or having conversations with acquaintances we’d bumped into and then, awkwardly, had to walk alongside for a very long time because we turned out to be parked in the same row of the parking lot and we hadn’t had Air Pods to prevent the initial conversation from starting up. I used to work at a two-screen movie theater, and every day there’d be people who would show up not even knowing what was playing! They’d drive across town, look up at the two movies we were showing, and pick one. Or they’d go home. It was wild how chill we were.

I’m sure we complained about those very things at the time, but the unmediated life had its charms. A baseball game is, to me, a way of living that way on a small (three-hours) scale. You start a game, and that’s basically the last part of it that you control. Maybe the game will be kinda boring; or, by contrast, maybe it will be really boring. You’re stuck with the commercial breaks, you’re stuck with two (often) dull (usually) dudes gabbing the whole time, inevitably Aaron Loup shows up for longer than you’re interested in him. Something unplanned happens that you’re not expecting, like a bat exploding and cork flying all over the field. But the game does nothing extra to try to win you over. Absolutely nobody is looking over to the crowd, like “do you like this? more? less? louder?” It has its own purpose and script, it follows through on it, and we get to enjoy it with zero ability to effect what happens next. In that way, it’s calming. 

That’s the pre-internet life. It was worse in some ways but better in others. I think baseball is one of the few ways it survives.

Postscript
A few commenters noted that they were being served ads specific to what this video implied were their interests: Cork. Cork flooring.

1. I’m extrapolating based on what percentage of the video’s comments were posted on these days; this will be true anytime I refer to “views” from here out.