America's Team

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/24/upshot/facebook-baseball-map.html?_r=0

 

Very cool map. Only thing that needs to be tweaked is where teams of like colors overlap. Need better differentiation.

 

Interesting that even in Alameda County, the Giants outpoll the A's by a significant margin (49-28).

 

d_b with baseball thread

 

Braves are by far the favorite team in our part of Florida, but we're on the cheapest AP service possible and only get Rays and Marlins games.

 

There's some odd selection bias going on in this data. I'm not sure how useful it is, if it all.

The map says that the Yankees are the dominant team in my community followed by the Red Sox then the Braves. That doesn't bear out with real life experience and I strongly suspect that a scientific survey would find that the teams in my community go more like this 1) Braves 2) Rays 3) Red Sox 4) Yankees. The only two teams you ever really hear people talking about around here are the Braves and Rays, the latter of which is because we've got one of their minor league affiliates. We've had a decent influx of people moving from the northeast. I wonder if they're somehow over-represented in the Facebook sample.

If this is based solely on which teams people "liked" on Facebook, I'm curious what percentage of Facebook users bother to "like" a team they root for - I know I haven't. I'm also curious about how reliable the "like" data is for representing true interests.

The map makes for something interesting to talk about.

 

Braves are huge, or at least used to be huge, in the Richmond area and south of Richmond. I'm not buying the Yankees are top.

 

The Nats are only on top in the DC area when they're winning. Nobody gives a shit otherwise.

 

I cant imagine the typical Phillies fan posting a Facebook "like" for anything, let alone the team.

 

I have a feeling Manky's point is you can't plop down a cursor anywhere and not have the Yankees in the top three.

A similar NFL map would be true for the Cowboys.

 

To your point, the Braves and Cubs (and to a lesser extent the Mets, who also for a time were on cable on WWOR, but not in my market) used to have legions of national fans thanks to cable TV that seem to have dried up over the last 15 years. Thank the new broadcasting setup and ESPN for televising just about all 19 Yankees-Red Sox games for a lot of it.

I also found it telling that in Texas, every county in the state had the Rangers either No. 1 or No. 2 (with the exception of the trans-Pecos counties near El Paso, which fell in line with New Mexico and went Yankees), while the Astros held just the ring of counties surrounding Houston. A sliver of East Texas counties topped by the one Longview is in still had a tiny amount of Astros fans who registered.

I was always told the old-timers were Astros fans because they were here a decade before the Rangers moved. These numbers do not bear that out. (And old-timers are much bigger into Facebook than Gen X, which has moved on to other platforms like Twitter.)