I’m a Jeff McNeil fan and I didn’t even know it

The Milwaukee Brewers 2024 season has begun and it’s been a fun first couple of games. They have all been relatively close and there seems to be a lot of energy so far. That being said, it usually is easier to have that energy when you are winning, which the Brewers have thus far been doing, but still, if they can still keep of this competitive nature while bringing this enthusiasm to the games, it’ll be a fun season, even when/if they come back down to Earth.

In the Crew’s opening game, new Brewers’ first baseman Rhys Hoskins made a hard slide into second base during an attempted double play, a move that the Mets Jeff McNeil took great exception to. McNeil made it very clear that he was quite unhappy with the play, putting on quite the display to communicate that he felt that Hoskins’s slide was inappropriate. After a not so quick bench clearing and review over the play, it was noted that the slide was a legal one and everyone went on with their lives as normal.

Well, not quite everyone. Plays like these are not quickly forgotten, either by the players or by the fans. The next day, Hoskins was in the midst of a fairly effective game at the plate and, in the seventh inning, Mets reliever Yohan Ramirez threw at him and was ejected for his efforts.

Now, to me, the whole thing was a bit blown out of proportion. I didn’t think Hoskins’s slide was that bad and I felt that McNeil’s reaction was a bit much given what had actually happened. That being said, I was also aware that I was looking at the situation through blue and yellow tinted glasses, so when some posts on the incident cycled through my social media feed, I bravely went where no person should ever go to see if my read on the situation was one that others shared as well. The comment section.

Taking everything I read with a big grain of salt, it seemed that the general consensus was that the play was fine, with the Mets fandom as the big exception to the rule, as expected. Nothing all too interesting there and with my curiosity sated, I went about the rest of my life, not thinking much about it.

However, my social media platforms had other ideas. For days, posts regarding the play or the Mets in general continued to pop up as I scrolled through the never ending stream of content. While I had moved on, or had tried to, my couple minute excursion into the controversy had fed into the machinery to determine what appears on one’s feed and had come out the other side with the conclusion that I love Rhys Hoskins, Jeff McNeil and the NewYork Mets.

As of writing this column, I’m still in the midsts of trying to “teach” my social media’s algorithms that I am not actually a Mets fan, making sure to scroll as quickly past any Mets’fan page posts as quickly as possible in hopes that the systems that be will recognize my nonengagement with these posts and allow me to move on. It’s an odd ritual when I stop and think about it.

This is not a one off situation, but rather just the most recent occurrence of it. In their hunt to keep their audiences engaged with their platform, the algorithms that these platforms utilize seem to have become…overzealous, in my opinion. Sit too long on a picture of a cute kitten? You probably want 10,000 more of those, right? Look at one meme about Game of Thrones? Here are 15 posts spoiling the ending of the show, because you’ve obviously watched the whole thing already. Delve into the comment section of an NBA post on Jayson Tatum? Clearly a Celtics fan, here’s Larry Bird’s top ten favorite restaurants.

It’s interesting how these systems try to determine what we do or don’t like, and like almost all technology, it is not inherently good or bad. Some sort of sorting is necessary; sifting through the countless bits of information on the Internet would be an incredibly frustrating or downright impossible task without it. But we also need to be conscious that this sorting is happening in the first place so that we can make better, more insightful observations about the results we are being given and thus make better choices.

Whether it is not knowing certain shows exist because your streaming service has determined that you won’t like them, never visiting sites beyond the first page of a search engine’s results, or getting trapped in echo chambers of opinion on social media, these algorithms have a significant hold over the way we engage with the Internet and our world in general. With AI tools becoming more prevalent, it is especially important that we are conscious of how these systems function so that we can best utilize them without being taken advantage of ourselves. In this instance, I feel being conscious of this occurring is half the battle.

Anyway, I’ve got to go teach Facebook that I don’t need more posts trying to sell me Jeff McNeil signed jerseys. I have enough of those already.

A C ertain Point of V iew