One cheesesteak shop's commercials keep fueling SF Giants hot streaks

The SF Giants are 28-12 since Brandon Crawford's unsettling 'mukbang' cheesesteak commercial debuted, building on a storied history.

When the SF Giants won a franchise-record 107 games in 2021, they were fueled by a number of factors. Strong pitching, breakout offensive seasons, a strong final year from Buster Posey, and a hypnotic commercial for the Cheese Steak Shop.

In the ad, Giants outfielder Alex Dickerson walks into a Cheese Steak Shop and somberly discusses all of the sacrifices his fighter pilot father made for the family growing up. Dickerson nearly cries at the table as he tells the camera, "Knowing that he sacrificed so much for me to have the life I have? It means the world to me."

Then the mood abruptly pivots, as Dickerson takes a huge bite of the cheese steak and declares, "This is legitimately the best cheesesteak I’ve had outside of Philly."

This commercial ran at nearly every inning break for the entirety of the 2021 season, meaning it was impossible not to associate the mostly-bleak Cheese Steak Shop ad with that magical year. It also made countless fans Google Dickerson's minor league statistics to see if he spent an unusual amount of time in Philadelphia. (He did not.)

After Dickerson departed for the Atlanta Braves, the Cheese Steak Shop shifted gears with a series of ads featuring former manager Bruce Bochy, coaches Ron Wotus and Tim Flannery, all doing musical sketch comedy about cheese steaks. They didn't have nearly the emotional heft or the strangeness of the Dickerson commercial, and the team fell to 81-81.

This year, the Cheese Steak Shop ads are back to featuring a current Giants player, and back to being really odd. Specifically, it's an ad called "Brandon Crawford Mukbang."

"Mukang" (a portmanteau of the Korean words for "eating" and "broadcast") is a popular genre of internet video where the performer films themselves eating food, often in large quantities. This ad also incorporates elements of ASMR, as the sounds of Crawford's eating are amplified and distorted.

As weird as the ad turned out, the Giants have gone 27-12 since the Crawford commercials hit YouTube on May 13. Crawford returned from a calf strain May 14, at which point he was slashing .162/.235/.338. Since then, he's hit .259/.344/.341, and the team has been scored 5.49 runs per game - like Crawford, they're going wild at the plate.

Alex Shultz wrote the definitive account of the Dickerson commercial for SFGATE. Shultz has since moved on to the news beat, chronicling Steph Curry's war on affordable housing and SF Giants owner Charles Johnson's battle against a crab shack, but he was kind enough to weigh in on the Crawford ad.

Shultz found the audio deeply unsettling, describing Crawford's chewing as sounding "like what you'd hear in a sci-fi movie from the '80s where they cut to the alien devouring the innards of a space station guard."

"I think if you put a mic on anyone and ask them to chew on something, they will usually produce a deeply unsettling sound," Shultz wrote. "Mukbangs are not really my thing. But whether or not you enjoy the ASMR aspect of said mukbangs, I'd hope we could all agree the initial noises Crawford produces here do not make sense. I assumed, and still kind of assume upon rewatch, that the advertising agency messed with the audio when he takes his first bite? I hope that's the case???"

"Anyway, contrasting that opening with an ASMR-whisper outro gave me some serious whiplash, making it a worthy spiritual successor to the unexpected plot twists in the Alex Dickerson commercial. The Dickerson ad is definitely better. Gonna be hard to beat that one. But given that the Giants are killing it since the Crawford ad debuted, it's clear the team needs to roll out Cheese Steak Shop ads whenever a winning streak is required."

Luckily, there are two additional Crawford Cheese Steak commercials for the team to deploy. In one, a magical "Brandon Button" causes Crawford to apparate behind the counter and work the lunch rush at the Cheese Steak Shop.

It's also pretty weird, especially due to the use of stunt arms to do the cheese steak grill work. Of course, health and safety regulations would require Crawford to hold back his lustrous locks in a hair net, but it looks strange, especially in orange. And at the end, he disappears with a wink, like a Dodger fan after the bottom of the seventh inning.

The third ad seems to recycle B-roll from the Mukbang ad, and it's far too conventional to spark a winning streak.

If that last ad was airing during the recent Diamondbacks series, it may explain why the Giants fell short of a sweep. In fact, Balke Sabol may have expected J.D. Davis to magically disappear from the basepaths when he obliviously ran to third base Sunday.

Can bizarre local advertising really fuel the SF Giants to a playoff berth? All we know is that these are legitimately the weirdest commercials outside of Philly.