Study Proves What We Already Knew: Dodgers Have the Best Fans in MLB

Emory University's Sports Marketing Analytics department does statistical analysis of various sports teams, markets, players, and fanbases. Their MLB study from 2013 ranked the Dodgers and Red Sox, who arrive at Chavez Ravine this Friday, as the teams tied for first place in their analysis of the sport's "best fans". Trot that out the next time some annoying Yankees fans talks about how our people leave games early, are "thugs", or other nonsense that is now repudiated by rigorous scientific analysis.

Our hated rivals to the North were a distant 4th place, while the Angels were at the very bottom of the heap, ranked last in all of Major League Baseball.

From the study:

One of our favorite types of analyses at Emory Sports Marketing Analytics is to assess the brand equity (a proxy for fan intensity and loyalty) of sports teams. Today, we present our analysis of MLB fan bases. Thus far, in our short history, we have looked at the brand equity of college and pro basketball teams. For those who are unfamiliar, brand equity is a common concept in marketing. The basic idea is that well known and well regarded brands provide value to organizations. Examples of high brand equity brands include Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Apple. These brands have value because consumers may have significant loyalty to the brand, or may be willing to pay a price premium. There are a wide variety of methods for calculating brand equity. Most methods involve surveys of consumers, and focus on data such as awareness levels, loyalty rates or consumer associations.

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Over the five years of data examined, the Angels won 56% of their games versus about 52% for the Dodgers. But despite this difference the Dodgers still drew more fans (~ 300k per year) and had much higher ticket prices.