Here Are the Fans Who Read FanGraphs
It’s probably no secret that I like to run polling projects, as a means of crowdsourcing various questions. From time to time, I’ll run posts that include polls for all 30 teams, and as soon as those posts get published I can’t wait to get a chance to analyze the data. It’s fun to see what the data says about the questions being directly asked, but that’s not the only use. We can also examine demographics!
In some polling posts, you’re free to participate however much you want. In others, though, I ask you to self-identify as a fan of a specific team, or of specific teams. For example, in a polling post about which teams might beat the projections, I’m fine with everyone voting for everyone. But when it comes to, say, fan excitement ratings, then I’m just looking for you to vote about your own favorite team. Very obviously, I can’t actually control how you vote, but the numbers show that you all do a pretty good job of playing along.
So with that being said — here’s a small meta-analysis. I looked at the numbers from all of my polling projects in which you were expected to vote for just one or two teams. This only goes back a couple years, but by looking at participation, we can see where the audience loyalties are. Which fan bases are over- or under-represented around these parts? Wonder no more!
It’s important to note, again, this covers just a couple of years. Within those years, the Blue Jays have been successful, and the Cubs have been wildly successful, so, yeah, that sort of makes sense. But the Cubs have had the highest turnout, followed by the Jays, followed by a massive gap until you get to the Red Sox. They might as well be even with the Mariners. At the left are the fans who’ve been around and most eager to participate in polling projects.
On the right, the opposite of that. One of every 54 participants has identified as a fan of the Rockies. One of every 53 participants has identified as a fan of the Padres. The teams over there mostly aren’t very good, and a lack of success is going to depress online reading and engaging, but I bet the lowest teams aren’t surprising. I’ve mentioned before that certain teams just don’t seem to have strong Internet communities, at least as far as overlapping with FanGraphs goes. I know there are Rockies fans, but they can be difficult to reach.
I don’t have anything else. I just got the idea to create a little bar chart. As you were!
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
You say this information comes from a number of years?
I’d be interested to know just how many. The Cubs have been successful on the major league level for two years; however, prior to that they were anything but successful.
That isn’t meant to be defensive, simply leaving it here as a reminder.
Mostly just 2015 and 2016
A better question might be: how many polls vs votes does this come from, and, were there many polls that didn’t fit closely to the overall trend? What I’m thinking is, did the Cubs pad their lead with the recent “How did you feel?” polls, and how would it look if the number of votes contributing here were normalized per poll.
Right, but we Phillies fans don’t care about graphs. We care about production.
Yeah right. If you cared about production, why all the hate for Ryan Howard?
Wait, they’re all blue! Only Democrats like baseball? You using 538’s polling model?
🙂
I can definitely see the Cubs success explaining their popularity. But even prior to their success, the Epstein factor and all the intrigue surrounding their rebuild may have contributed.
But with the Blue Jays, I don’t think they have been successful enough recently to explain their popularity. Why them instead of the Giants or Red Sox? In their particular case I’m guessing it’s a kludge of cultural things particular to Toronto, beyond the recent success of their franchise.
As a Jay’s fan, I can think of two big reasons. First, they just have a really big fanbase. Their games are on basic cable across Canada, making them the default team for 35 million people. Even before they got good, they were averaging over half a million viewers, and significantly more now. From what I can find online, no other team gets close in terms of ‘local’ TV ratings. It doesn’t show up in attendance as much, because most fans live too far away to go, but you can see it in how well the fanbase travels.
Second, the fanbase is spread across a huge area. That seems to have resulted in a stronger online presence than most fanbases, because most of their fans live a too far away to go to games or fan bars, etc. in person. Other teams with regional fanbases and lots of fans outside their home city (Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox, etc.) have this effect to some extent, but I’d bet no other fanbase has as high a proportion of fans who do most of their talking about the team online.
As a Toronto Blue Jays fan, I strenuously object to your apostrophe usage.
Autocorrect is not my friend.
I move that we reallocate fan bases. The next 20 people to read this article are officially Rockies fans now.
What did those 20 people ever do to you?
OK, I’m in. Arenado is great, and LeMahieu is also exciting! And… um… they probably have someone that catches, right?
And TWO Tylers on the pitching staff? How could I Not love this team?
As long as it’s not the padres.
Ouch! But, yeah.
Weather is really nice here, tho.
Haha true! in 5 years or so should be a fun team to watch though.
What would be interesting as well is to find some sort of denominator. Something to control for the population size of those fans. Of course there are going to be Cubs, Jays, Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets fans are those are all very populated cities (#3, #10, #1, #1 in US metro population respectively – excluding the Toronto which is #1 metro in Canada).
Maybe metro population isn’t it. Maybe it could be TV market size, as most sports fans probably own a TV too (a sweeping generalization I know). Or perhaps by total attendance as most fans go to at least one game (but then you are kinda penalizing the team for those who go to more than one game).
I’m guessing that if you controlled for population size of fan base, the Royals would lap the field. Two data points to support that theory: (a) where they are on this list already; and (2) all-star voting – at one point in 2015, KC was projecting to field the entire starting lineup for the AL, and at one point this season, they were projected with three, and another four were in second. KC fans are nuts, and good for them.
Interesting data, but I’m not convinced of your narrative on causation Jeff. I know you’ve been trying for a while to identify readership fandom trends and I applaud you for it, but here’s my thought on this, I think this effect is stronger than you might think:
“a lack of success is going to depress online reading and engaging”
My top evidence for this – look how strongly fan attendance is correlated to winning percentage. It’s a huge effect. Let’s dig into a couple teams to look at this
The Royals ranked #10? I don’t think Google Fiber it’s what’s making them so active online. Finally building a World Series winner after decades and decades of being a cellar dweller small-market team? Yeah I think there’s some bandwagon issues here.
The Athletics ranked #15? For Fangraphs, that seems way low. Maybe we’re finally far enough removed from Moneyball, and the sheen of Billy Beane, sabermetric hero has worn off. But throughout the 2000’s Oakland was a top darling of the sabermetric community. I dunno, maybe it’s that fanbase keeping Oakland afloat here instead of dropping down farther after two miserable seasons?
The stated goal here is Fangraphs readership trends, and I think you have to deal with the fact that readership by fandom will fluctuate massively around team success. Trying to extract the base “core” fandom is going to be tricky with all that season-to-season variability, and for me I think the real story is simply that the bandwagon effect is huge. There is some base-level difference with fans. There are some always popular teams (Red Sox, Yankees). There is the Seattle effect still lingering because Dave Cameron runs this blog.
And the rest is just this – it’s more fun for most people to read and engage on articles about their favorite WINNING team.
Maybe I am wrong, but I would say that the majority of fans visiting Fangraphs are lovers of baseball first, and fans of a particular team second.
Sounds like a question for a polling project!
Until I had my mind blown open by this graph, that’s what I always assumed too.
My cats are named Fenway and Wrigley. I have a hard time self identifying with one team.
I assume your next cat will be Guaranteed Rate?
Idk if it’s better or worse than mobile phone park.
I have a 3rd. Tessie, after the song by dropkick murphys that was in mvp baseball the year I got her.
That’s a good name.
The left- and the right-side bars really do reflect fan enthusiasm based on how their teams are doing over the last few years, for the positive or negative. I did figure the Royals might be a tick or three higher since they won the World Series in 2015, but perhaps their mediocre showing in 2016 (comparatively to the two prior seasons) dragged them down a bit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but do you normally do the AL first in these polls? That could have an effect. Always ordering the teams in one order (alphabetical) could, too.
I think if you added “My fantasy team” as an option, you’d have a new number 1 team.
What are the actual values for this graph? I’m interested in comparing W% over the past two years to readership %. I expect a correlation, but what I’m really interested in is seeing what teams are “outliers” in terms of expected readership % vs. actual readership %.