Clark County actually likes the Yankees more than the Dodgers
Facebook has been busy mapping what the country’s most-liked Major League Baseball teams are by county, just in time for Opening Day.
The social network’s data scientists analyzed the 30 MLB teams’ Facebook pages and plotted the data based on which pages had the most likes from people in each U.S. county. (Here’s a link to a larger version.)
To no one’s surprise, Yankees fandom is far-flung, reaching outside of New York and extending as far east as Idaho.
A bit more shocking is that Clark County, generally assumed to be Dodgers territory, ended up going to the Yankees. In fact, only Nye County went to the Dodgers. Clark, Lincoln and Elko counties are Yankee territory, according to Facebook. Esmerelda County didn’t have enough data and Lander County went to the Red Sox. The rest of Nevada bleeds Giants orange.
A few other parts of the country have interesting divisions: Utah seems to be full of bandwagon fans and is split entirely between the Yankees and Red Sox. The Rockies didn’t take a single county, despite being the closest MLB team to the state. The Rangers took all of Texas except a relatively small area around Houston, which went to the Astros. And most of Michigan’s upper peninsula went to the Tigers over the Brewers.
Three teams don’t show up on the map at all: There were no counties where the plurality of fans like the Mets, Athletics or Blue Jays. That’s unsurprising considering two of those teams are in the same territory as two more successful franchises — the Yankees and Giants — and the remaining team is in Canada.
On a slightly related note, now seems like a good time to lament Las Vegas being blacked out for six teams’ games: the Giants, Dodgers, Padres, Athletics, Angels and Diamondbacks.
Contact Stephanie Grimes at sgrimes@reviewjournal.com. Find her on Twitter: @stephgrimes