Watercooler Blog

So it came out last Saturday that three-time MVP and 12-time All Star Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. He admitted it today on ESPN, and columns far and wide have come forth to opine on everything from his Hall of Fame chances to whether the Yankees should eat his $270 million contract and release him. But has this story impacted the Yankees’ actual relationship with their fans?

Well, it just so happens that here at Watercooler, we have a New York Yankees fan community across the major social networks that allow users to express their fandom.

And here is a table with the total number of users with our application installed, along with the number of new users added per day for the past two weeks:

So while users have continued to add the app, the number of new users from this past weekend represent a 20% drop from the number of new users from a week before, despite 71% of Yankees fans in our app saying that they accept A-Rod’s apology for using steroids. Of course, there coule be structural factors causing a decrease in the rate of new fans. However, while a check of MLB-wide stats also shows in a decline in the rate of new fans, the fall in rate is only 5.5% across all baseball apps in our social networks. 

And what are those fans saying? Perhaps not surprisingly, not much. Each app has a waves feature which allows users to create a cause and send them to their friends. Here is a screencap of the most recent waves to be forwarded in the Yankees app:

It’s almost as if nothing that important happened this weekend.

On the other hand, for kicks, let’s take a look and see what Red Sox fans on Facebook are up to…

As of this writing, the top three Red Sox waves about the scandal (the A-Fraud wave was started just today) have been passed a combined 5,914 times. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Red Sox have been adding fans on Facebook at a rate more than twice of the Yankees:

So it turns out that there’s evidence for some steroids effect, at least among users on social networks.