• Joe: Just came across this. Interesting. Here's the way I would frame it: In the ...
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The Indians Are MLB’s Most-Hated Team? The Indians?

POSTED BY ON 8:46 pm, April 29, 2010 - POSTED IN Diamond cuts

Every now and then on Teh Interwebs, you read something that you know — you just know — simply cannot be true. Today, I read one of those things when I read that the Indians of Cleveland are major league baseball’s most-hated team. And yet, according to Nielsen, they are.

And while I find it entirely believable the Red Sox are baseball’s second-most hated team, I find it utterly inexplicable that baseball’s most loved team is…the San Francisco Giants?

But before we throw up our hands and declare that the Series of Toobz has gone officially mad, let’s look a bit closer at the data. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Nielsen did this research by analyzing Internet keywords with an algorithm. What, then, does this really tell us? That Northern Californians are, like, chill, laid-back people who are generally pretty pleased with life? That Red Sox fans are ridiculously judgmental?

For these groundbreaking insights someone paid good money?

Yet the animosity towards the Indians is still unexplained. In my experience, Indians fans are generally a long- and quietly-suffering lot. And the Indians themselves, as the WSJ mused, “simply haven’t done a lot over the past 13 years to warrant that much attention.”

UmpBumpers, what am I missing here? Or is this so-called “world wide web” just a web of lies?

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6 comments so far

6 Responses to “The Indians Are MLB’s Most-Hated Team? The Indians?”

  1. Hannah says:
    April 30, 2010 at 10:27 am

    I’m guessing it has to do with various non-baseball sites complaining about the racism of the name/mascot/fan traditions. I don’t think the Braves come in for as much vitriol, though I couldn’t tell you why.

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  2. Alex says:
    May 6, 2010 at 7:06 pm

    They’re still shitty.

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  3. HelmetHead says:
    February 13, 2011 at 5:30 pm

    I would love to think the reason the Indians are the most hated is because of their name and their absurdly, almost surreally, racist cartoon logo. I’m just baffled that Chief Wahoo still exists. But, unfortunately, I don’t think most sports fans give a monkey’s about stuff like that, so I agree that the data are flawed.

    The Yankees are clearly the most hated team in baseball. The Red Sox are very likely second, but I think that’s just a coincidence here where the flawed methodology simply got lucky. Depending where you go, there could actually be more anti-Red Sox than anti-Yankees sentiment, too. While most people outside hate the Yanks because of the way they buy teams and drive the mean salaries up, they are also respected as being the original Big Money team. They also carry themselves with a certain air of dignity. The Sox have become “Yankees Lite” by following the same “let’s overpay every free agent who comes on the market” philosophy of buying championships. But, this makes them even more hated for many people for two reasons: first, the only thing worse than an arrogant ass is an copycat arrogant ass; second, their behavior on the field is completely disrespectful to both their opponents and the game of baseball. The way they dress, the way the behave, the way they trash-talk… it shows a complete lack of respect for the game and people notice.

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