MLB Teams Likability Matrix (survey results)

Here are the results of a recent post I made in r/baseball asking you to fill out a survey about how much you like each MLB team!

First, I want to thank everyone who filled out the survey as we got over 3,700 responses! The most represented team is the Toronto Blue Jays 539 responses, and the least represented team is the Tampa Bay Rays with 23 responses. The graphic was generated with Python using matplotlib and the numbers you are looking at is just a simple average of all the votes for a specific team.

They way the teams are sorted is by friendliness along the top, and by likability along the side. Friendliness is measured as the average score given out by a fanbase, and one funny thing to note is that not a single fanbase gave out an average score greater than or equal to 3. Likability is simply the average score a team was given, and the only real thing of note here is that it does include the votes from members of that specific fanbase. The matrix is read with the number in the box representing how much the team on top likes the team on the side.

The rest of this post will explore the results of both this graphic, and some other fun facts we can extract from the data.

I think its to no ones surprise that the Houston Astros were the most hated team and probably still not every surprising to anyone that the Seattle Mariners were the most beloved team. This probably also makes it not that big of a surprise that the friendliest pair of teams was the Seattle Mariners and Arizona Diamondbacks with a mutual harmonic mean of 3.78. I chose to use a harmonic mean here to reward teams that mutually like each other and not one-sided relationships where one team for example grades another team a 5, while only a 3 is reciprocated. (Although the result is the same even if you just use a simple mean)

Another unsurprising result is the biggest rivalry being the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. This one was especially fun to see in data for me since its always hard for me to tell how much the media is building a narrative about a series when you aren't a fan of a team and just looking in from the outside. The top 5 biggest rivalries are as follows:

Boston Red Sox ↔ New York Yankees — 1.10

Houston Astros ↔ New York Yankees — 1.13

Houston Astros ↔ Los Angeles Dodgers — 1.17

New York Mets ↔ Philadelphia Phillies — 1.19

Atlanta Braves ↔ New York Mets — 1.20

Some teams that might need to start some rivalries as they have the most one sided relationships, defined by the biggest gap in the likability score they gave each other are as follows:

New York Yankees → Minnesota Twins — gap +2.00

Houston Astros → Baltimore Orioles — gap +1.85

New York Yankees → Seattle Mariners — gap +1.85

Houston Astros → Cleveland Guardians — gap +1.84

Houston Astros → Milwaukee Brewers — gap +1.82

The team of the left is the team that thinks more positively of the team on the right.

The top 5 most polarizing fanbases, with high numbers of 5s and 1s, and extra emphasis being put on having both 5s and 1s and not just being universally hated (no teams were universally loved so that's irrelevant) are as follows:

Los Angeles Dodgers

New York Yankees

Houston Astros

Toronto Blue Jays

Boston Red Sox

This is about what we would expect here, and is backed up by looking at the histograms of teams and looking for the most U shaped graphs.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on this fun little experiment! I would again like to credit this video by NBArecap for the idea, and thank you for all the support and enthusiasm for the idea. I would love to hear feedback and maybe do this again at the start of the season. I think it would be cool to see how these sentiments change over time and to see how specific events might change peoples opinions. I'm happy to hear any feedback and criticism about how I could make this better, and I'm also happy to answer any more questions people have to the best of my abilities. I'd be happy to post my code also if people are interested (please let me know the best way to do that if you are interested) although I will say I'm not a coder at all and used AI to help with a majority of the code. Responses to the survey are now closed, and you can find the full raw data here if you want to play with it yourself and come to your own conclusions!