Baseball Fever is Spreading - The Top 5 FanSection Spring Training Stats
25 Feb
Posted by: Bryan Bennett in: FanSection, Major League Baseball, Statistics
As hard as it is to believe, the start of the Major League Baseball season is only 5 weeks away. By now teams have settled into their spring training homes in Florida and Arizona, and FanSection fans are starting to ramp up again. As you would expect, the MLB communities were pretty quiet through November, December, and January but they’re definitely coming out of their hibernation to rally support before Opening Day. Here are just a couple of interesting nuggets coming out of our MLB apps:
Boston extends massive lead
The Red Sox have established an iron grip on first place within the FanSection community with over 458,000 fans. That’s 40% more fans than the second place Chicago Cubs at 277,000. As a point of note, Boston fans outnumber Yankees fans 2:1.
ARod steriod mess plays out on Facebook
When the ARod steriod fiasco first broke, over 47,000 Boston fans passed on the A-Fraud wave to their Facebook friends. Conversely, 71% of Yankees fans say they forgive him while 11% said they will if he plays well this year. Nice.
Phillies fans looking forward to opening day
Nothing like winning a World Series Championship to give your fans a little confidence. Phillies fans are turning out in droves to drive their team to a close third behind Chicago with 261,000 fans - a 30% increase since the end of the 2008 season. The big driver is an Opening Day Countdown wave started on Jan 25 and thus far passed along almost 100,000 times.
The viral growth has led to a huge increase in monthly active users for the Phillies:
The smack talk is already starting
Fans of the Red Sox, Yankees, and Phillies are already starting the smack talk with all of those communities posting double digit percentage gains since the end of the 2008 season. I can understand the Yankees and Red Sox since they hate each other year around, but it looks like Phillies fans are doing a lot of crowing about the city’s first championship in forever.
Overall growth of the FanSection MLB community is staggering
We’ve added over 530,000 new baseball fans since the end of last season for a 28% increase. That means 2.5 million baseball fans rally around their teams in the FanSection community - third behind NFL football and NCAA football. The 2009 MLB season is shaping up to be a good one.
[...] for those that want to watch while at work. As noted in a Top 5 post from a few weeks ago, the FanSection baseball communities are already off and running despite no marketing or other stimulus yet. That’s a great sign considering we ended the [...]
good good his post deserves nothing!