When I watched the video this morning, I had the distinct impression that the bottles were exploding. Now the video shows them rocketing into the air.
Which one of you switched out the video?. 
The bottle mist and the pizza mist are using the same editing technique to produce.
I’m firmly in the ‘fake’ camp.
Good Lord, how can anybody think that’s real? For a baseball to punch a hole like that in an unsupported pizza box, it would have to be fired from a rail gun. Probably not even then.
Hurricane Sandy has left me with way too much time to watch this video and contemplate the chances of it being fake. I would like to bring up the biggest tell-tale sign of a faked viral video:
Bad acting.
Now for anyone who is familiar with the Mythbusters program, they are just horrendous actors. Everything is super exaggerated and often feels like Take #32. So, when I see Kari and Tory make ridiculous faces and jump around, I’m not surprised.
Unfortunately, we never get to see the pitch and the kids in the same shot, so we can’t really judge their full reactions. That being said, even the best child actors tend to be obvious and over-exaggerated. Getting 5 of them to act realistically is well… unrealistic. And judging by their Children of the Corn appearance, they’re probably someone’s kids and their friends. I think it’s very unlikely that these kids are faking a reaction to some CGI event (and IMO CGI is the only way you could fake this video).
Matt Cain reacts pretty much exactly as I would expect an MLB pitcher to. There is a certain humility, while behind his grin you can see the “F— yeah I’m good” going through his mind, and possibly “Kari is hot”. Not only does he appear genuine, but athletes tend to be the most horrible actors.
For what it’s worth, I think I found the park. They’re on the northwest baseball diamond at Moscone Recreation Center 1800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA. I don’t know what good that does, probably none.
Another vote for fake. Going frame by frame, the soda bottle explodes violently for about 4 frames and then there are another 4-6 frames where the explosion seems to pause, not getting any bigger and not seemingly affected by gravity.
Especially the part of the explosion that is directed downward - that part seems like it should have continued to accelerate downward ever more quickly due to gravity - but it just sort of hangs there. At which point they conveniently cut away so they don’t have to animate it all the way to the ground.
Also, I think the trajectory of the pizza box should have been affected significantly, particularly since it was hit so far from the center, but it doesn’t so much as wobble. And I’m also in the camp that thinks a baseball would not have left such a relatively clean round hole - not through the box and not through the pizza. The box looks like corrugated cardbord that I would expect to tear along the lines rather than yielding in such a perfect circle.
I’m not buying it.
As I’m sure you can judge from my previous posts, IANAE, but isn’t that exactly how an object is supposed to act when it reaches the top of its arc? Toss a ball in the air and you’ll see it hang there before accelerating back down. Even I remember that from my high school physics class.
I think that would only be true if it stopped the baseball. Newton’s 3rd law of motion talks about equal and opposite reactions, but that would only slow the ball down, not create a new set of forces. To reiterate: IANAE
Of course. It would have flipped over, and assuming it hadn’t been glued shut, opened up and pizza would have spewed out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the box hadn’t been doctored to make it just fly in such a predictable way, let alone being stuck by a baseball. The pizza would have moved about inside during the upward journey and likely produced some sort of wobble you would think.
In the search for more videos of balls being thrown into things, I found this. Around the 1:20 mark, a lacrosse ball is hurled into a (not pizza) box and bounces right off.
These guys certainly aren’t on the same level of athleticism as Cain, but it’s an intriguing comparison. I wish it supported my previous assertion that the OP’s video is real, but it doesn’t.
I still think it’s real though.
It’s ridiculously, obviously fake and if you had shown me the video and asked me what type of support it would get from the SDMB, I would’ve guessed MAYBE 15%?
Anyways, I reserve the right to laugh at some of you when it’s revealed as fake and why. 
Seems legit…
Whenever Kari Byron is involved, I’m firmly in one camp or another.
But yeah, fake.
Real, Fake, I don’t care. I just want Matt Cain on my dodge ball team. If he’s on an other team I ain’t playing
I think it probably is a fake, but even so, it is one hell of a well-designed viral marketing campaign fake.
It’s got us all hunting for evidence like we’re x-files agents. Isn’t that what a good viral marketing campaign should do?
If you’re going to create a poll and vote on my behalf, please get it right. I am, and have been, firmly in the “real” camp. Some of the film takes might have been discarded due to misses - he might not have struck the targets on each take.
But once the ball is thrown I believe what’s shown to be authentic - that is, he strikes the targets - with damage done to targets as shown. I think the ball penetrated both sides of the pizza box including the pizza. I think that is indeed the very same pizza with the cookie cutter hole through it, do not think they were swapped as some have suggested (although I think the person who tossed the pizza/box walked forward and moved it, changing its orientation.)
I think that the bottle, whatever one they used, burst as shown. I think the pinata broke in half as shown and watermelon was struck and damaged as shown.
I think this guy can really throw a ball, that’s what I think. It’s great to see a great thrower like this in action, totally-awesome kick-ass.
This may be a clever advertisement. But for Mythbusters - not the pizza place.
I believe it was real as well, what may have been partially rigged is that the myth buster team may have sprayed a little extra moisture on the cardboard that a steaming pizza may have provided to further weaken the box. The pizza would have sufficient mass to resist the hit of the ball and allow it to travel through the cardboard.
Sinisterniik - a thown object does not actually ‘‘hang’’ in the air for any length of time. Due to gravity, there is a continuous change of motion from going up to going down. So the time period at the height of its trajectory, with literally no vertical motion, is infinitesimally short both in theory and in practice for this discussion.
That is not to say that we can’t talk about a brief, non-zero time period over which the thrown object transitions from slowly moving up to slowly moving down. Presumably this is what you refer to as hanging in the air. That is fine, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with the point I was trying to make.
So, let’s assume the ball strikes the bottle during that time period as it appears to do so in the video. If it helps you understand my point, we can even treat the bottle and its contents as being stationary. In fact, let’s go a step further and just pretend the bottle has been hanging from a string until the point at which it’s hit by the ball.
What then should happen when the bottle ‘‘explodes’’? Well the fine mist (that I’m not concerned with) would be affected significantly by air resistance. So it would dissipate and float to the ground comparatively slowly - unlike the big globs of soda (that I am concerned with).
Those big globs of soda, ejected in all directions and clearly seen in the video, should essentially behave in a ballistic fashion after the initial acceleration due to the explosion. That is what I was talking about. And what I see in the video looks wrong in a not so subtle kind of way. It is easy to see IMHO when stepping through frame by frame.
The globs of soda that were ejected downward should have continued to move downward with increasing speed from the acceleration due to gravity. There is no reason I can think of why those globs should stop moving downward until they hit the ground. (The soda globs ejected sideways and upward would of course follow their own ballistic trajectories but the downward direction is easiest to think about and evaluate in the video.)
But that’s not what we see. Instead, we see the soda explode violently outward in all directions for several frames and then, for some mysterious reason, all of the big globs just…freeze…for several frames mind you, until the camera cuts away. It just doesn’t look real to me.
Anyhow, that’s what I see and that’s my analysis based on what I remember from my classes.
As far as the pizza box goes, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to directly address what you wrote regarding Newton’s laws of motion and sets of forces. Rather, I will just try to better convey what I would expect to see.
Most of us can likely scale up and scale down what we intuitively think should happen in this kind of collision with respect to the mass and speed of the thrown object. I imagine we’d all probably agree for example that a comparatively small and high speed bullet would pass through the box and the pizza easily, leaving a small clean hole without affecting the trajectory.
On the other hand, what about a bowling ball thrown at slow speed? Well that’s not going to leave a clean hole because it wouldn’t go through the box in the first place or even puncture it in any way for that matter. And it would most certainly affect the trajectory of the pizza box by simply knocking it out of the way.
We of course are talking about something in between those extremes, both for size and speed. And my gut feeling, in agreement with some and in disagreement with others, is that even if the baseball had really gone through the box, it would not have done so in such a clean fashion. And it should have noticeably affected the motion of the box.
My point about where the ball hit concerns the torque it should have imparted to the box. If the ball had hit exactly dead center, I would have expected the box to move straight backward by some amount. This would have been harder to notice on the video and therefore arguable. But the ball hit the box way off center, which I feel should have caused it to flip around or at the very least wobble a bit. But it didn’t do either of those things.
And in the spirit of trying to see both sides of the discussion, I will argue against myself for a moment. I concede that I think there is some gyroscopic resistance to a change of motion in that direction. Most are probably familiar with holding a spinning bicycle wheel and the resistance associated with trying to twist it out of the plane in which it is spinning. I think that may be at play here to some extent. However, the box is not spinning very quickly which should minimize that effect. But one of the truly smart science/math guys here would need to speak to any significance of that as I can only bring it up in a cursory way.
Thanks for posting that video even though it runs counter to your position. Besides being pretty cool footage with good music, I think it is instructive in this case. A quick search shows that lacrosse shots can reach 110mph, with average speeds in to 80-100mph range. Even if those guys aren’t some kind of pros, they are throwing the ball from the end of a stick which greatly increases the length of their throwing ‘‘arm’’. Those balls are moving. And as you note, the ball hits a box braced against a wall (a few times actually) and does nothing more than dent the front.
I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s episode of Mythbusters and hope they address this so we can put it to bed one way or the other. They are the ones that know what really happened. And I’m comfortable being wrong about all of this as long as I find out what the actual answer is.
Call me a skeptic. I don’t believe it for a minute.
Look at the guy throwing the watermelon. It’s going, what 20 feet in the air? I don’t think I could even throw a watermelon that high, let alone do it without spreading my feet. I really doubt that if I was to throw one as high as I could, my feet would leave the ground like that; I’d be pushing as hard as I could against the watermelon, which would keep my feet on the ground.
Also, anyone else notice that, no matter what gets thrown, it all goes the same height? Water bottle, watermelon, pizza, that donkey thing (I just don’t know how to spell pinata), it doesn’t matter, they all go the same height.
And, finally, what is that light-colored powder-like substance that falls out of the pizza box when it hits the ground? It certainly isn’t there before it hits, something comes out, but there is nothing like it in the box when they open it.
excavating (for a mind)
You’re probably trying to whoosh us, but just in case: that’s fake, too.