Local radio and Twitter responses have led me to believe that, in general, Orioles fans are a pretty miserable bunch. Apparently, that’s not the case.
Robert Arthur of Baseball Prospectus recently measured the happiness of all 30 MLB fanbases using a program that grades Reddit comments and posts. How’s it work? Here’s a brief synopsis:
[quote_box_center]To figure out how happy each team’s fanbase is, I did what’s called ‘sentiment analysis’ on each list of words. The idea is like this: Some words tend to be used in positive situations, and indicate that the writer is happier, while others are more negative in connotation, and suggestive of despair. For example, ‘excellence’ is a very positive word, and ‘deception’ an unpleasant one. If a team’s comments are filled with words like excellence, and bereft of words like deception, they are probably happy, and vice versa.[/quote_box_center]
The Orioles fanbase, or at least their community on Reddit, ranks 12th among the 30 MLB clubs in happiness according to Arthur’s “total affect rating.” Not surprisingly, the World Series champion San Francisco Giants ranked number one. The local rival Washington Nationals finished tenth.
Image Credit: Keith Allison
