Major League Baseball is looking for a new kind of fan

本文为原文前 6,000 字符的节选翻译，完整内容请查看原文。

Major League Baseball is looking for a new kind of fan. A sport historically averse to internet culture is finding success embracing fandom, trends, and influencers.

美国职业棒球大联盟（MLB）正在寻找一种新型球迷。这项历史上对互联网文化持抵触态度的运动，如今通过拥抱粉丝文化、潮流趋势和网红博主，取得了成功。

On October 2nd, just as Major League Baseball’s Division Series was kicking off, the main MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams still in the running for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and more sliding into home plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits — standard fare for a highlight reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it’s set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

10月2日，就在美国职业棒球大联盟分区系列赛拉开帷幕之际，MLB的官方Instagram和TikTok账号发布了一段视频，为仍在争夺世界大赛冠军的球队造势。视频中剪辑了密尔沃基酿酒人队、洛杉矶道奇队、芝加哥白袜队等球员滑垒、击出全垒打和庆祝胜利的画面——这本是集锦视频的常规操作。然而，这段剪辑真正出彩的地方在于，它配上了奥利维亚·罗德里戈（Olivia Rodrigo）的歌曲。

The song, “My Way,” is an album track — not even a single — from Rodrigo’s latest record. It’s not exactly the soundtrack one might expect from an MLB-produced video. (“And here is the part where the girl gets pissed / And the girl is me, did you get that hint?” she sings.) But as evidenced by the comments, it hit exactly the right people: “I see I’m part of a very niche part of MLB fans,” one person said. “Target audience reached,” another responded. The clip has over 2.1 million views on Instagram and 615,000 views on TikTok.

这首名为《My Way》的歌是罗德里戈最新专辑中的一首曲目，甚至不是主打单曲。这并不是人们预期中MLB制作视频会选用的配乐。（她在歌中唱道：“现在是女孩发火的部分 / 而那个女孩就是我，你听出暗示了吗？”）但正如评论区所显示的，它精准地击中了目标群体：“看来我是MLB球迷中非常小众的一部分，”有人评论道。另一位则回应：“目标受众已触达。”该视频在Instagram上的播放量已超过210万次，在TikTok上也有61.5万次播放。

“One of our favorite things is when a community says, ‘Oh, MLB knows ball,’ or, ‘Oh, I can’t believe my interests [are] converging,’” says Cameron Gidari, MLB’s vice president of social media and innovation. The social team is a fan of Rodrigo’s to begin with and loves the song, Gidari says, “but then also we thought we could make a really interesting edit with it, and we thought that community would appreciate being seen.”

“我们最喜欢看到的就是社区评论说‘噢，MLB真懂行’，或者‘天哪，我没想到我的兴趣点竟然重合了’，”MLB社交媒体与创新副总裁卡梅伦·吉达里（Cameron Gidari）说道。吉达里表示，社交媒体团队本身就是罗德里戈的粉丝，也很喜欢这首歌，“但我们也认为可以用它制作一段非常有趣的剪辑，并且我们觉得那个群体会因为被关注到而感到高兴。”

Acknowledging the combination of baseball–Olivia Rodrigo fans is smart. It also might be essential for the survival of the sport. People love baseball, of course, but it often feels like it’s trailing other sports, not just in viewership but also culturally. Baseball is famously stats heavy — there are thousands of games every season across the league, and teams play almost every day. What happens on the field today is often contextualized through what happened in games in the past, making it hard to jump in without a history of watching (or learning about) the sport.

承认棒球与奥利维亚·罗德里戈粉丝群体的重合是明智之举。这对于这项运动的生存可能也至关重要。人们当然热爱棒球，但它往往给人一种落后于其他运动的感觉，不仅是在收视率上，在文化影响力上也是如此。棒球以数据繁杂著称——联盟每个赛季有数千场比赛，球队几乎每天都在打球。今天赛场上发生的事情往往需要结合过去的比赛背景来理解，这使得没有长期观看（或学习）该运动历史的人很难入门。

Go back a few years, and you’d find MLB social channels were more “editorially focused,” Gidari says, focusing on facts of the game or highlights. Speaking to fans who have other interests — or who are simply more casual — has been a deliberate choice, he says. “Our tone overall on social is the tone of fandom,” Gidari says. “We think there is something really inviting and magnetic about that, and it was a conscious shift.”

吉达里说，回溯几年前，你会发现MLB的社交频道更偏向“编辑导向”，专注于比赛事实或精彩集锦。他表示，与那些有其他兴趣爱好，或者仅仅是更随意的球迷对话，是一个经过深思熟虑的选择。“我们在社交媒体上的整体基调是粉丝的基调，”吉达里说，“我们认为这其中有一种非常吸引人且具有磁性的特质，这是一个有意识的转变。”