Sports fan Facebook cards, like the a Facebook just published about Major League Baseball, are one of my favorite things:
But like Slate’s Will Oremus Remarks, this approach hides important information. Facebook’s map, which identifies the team with the most likes in each U.S. county, might give you the idea that the Texas Rangers, Colorado Rockies and Minnesota Twins are exceptionally popular. Indeed, they are reasonably appreciated over a large geographical area. But most of the counties within their territory are rural and sparsely populated. The problem is analogous to view maps of presidential election results by countywhich might make it look like Mitt Romney won the 2012 election when that is not the case.
Another way to gauge the popularity of a baseball team is to look at data from Google trends.
Google trends recently revealed a beta feature in which it groups search terms into topics. For example, search for “St. Louis Cardinals”, “Saint Louis Cardinals”, “Cardinals baseball” and so on, are grouped under the same topic heading. (This feature can also theoretically prevent false positives; for example, searches for “Texas Ranger” which sought information on the missing tv show will not be confused with those of the baseball team.) In most cases, this feature seems pretty smart; The topic “Miami Marlins” also appears to pick up searches for “Florida Marlins”, as the team was known before 2012.
The table below lists the number of Google searches for the topic associated with each MLB team. Figures shown are relative to league average. (The popularity of the Atlanta Braves, for example, is 1.14, meaning they are searched 1.14 times more often than the average MLB club.) They reflect Google searches worldwide entire since 2004, except in the case of the Washington Nationals, where I brought forward the figures from April 2005, because the team played in Montreal before that date.
According to Google searches, the Rangers have only average popularity, while the Twins and Rockies are below average. Conversely, the New York Mets, who have not won any county on the Facebook map, are the sixth most searched team in the world.
However, the most striking feature of Google’s data is the dominance of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. They are searched 3.8 and 3.7 times respectively, more often than the league average, and more than 10 times more often than the least popular teams.
The Yankees, of course, have a large population: there are about 20 million people in the New York metropolitan area. How does each team’s Google search popularity compare to that of size of its television market?
We make this comparison in the table below. I listed each team’s popularity on Google, the relative size of its television market (markets with two teams are split evenly between them), and then took the ratio between the two.
The Yankees rank third even by that criterion. But the Red Sox are clearly No. 1 and are about three times as popular as one would imagine given the size of Boston’s media market. The Cardinals, Cubs, Giants, Pirates and Reds also outperform relative to their market size.
Haters of the Red Sox might complain that the team’s market is much bigger than Boston’s: they’re also the “home” team in the rest of New England (with the exception of western Connecticut).
But the extent to which a team’s popularity increases may have a lot to do with how the team is run — and how often it wins. The Toronto Blue Jays theoretically have an entire country to themselves – but they are unpopular relative to the size of the Toronto market itself, let alone the population of Canada. The correlation between a team’s popularity in Google searches and its number of playoff appearances since 2004 is 0.62, an amount much higher than that between its popularity and its market size (0.38 ).
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are the worst performing relative to their population. I am somewhat wary of this data point, however. There are so many variations on the team name (“LA Angels”, “Anaheim Angels”, “This team with Mike Trout and 24 others”) that Google Trends might not understand all the ways to search for them, even with its new and improved algorithms.
