It seems like baseball teams have more of a local following than football teams, which seem to draw fans from across the nation. Why is that the case?
Modding: I moved this to the Game Room.
Football is an event game, only 8 home games vs. 81 for baseball.
Football has only a National TV contract vs. mostly local TV contracts for baseball. I think that has a lot to do with it.
For what it is worth, baseball also has some big national teams. Yanks & Dodgers especially.
And, in the '70s and '80s, the presence of every Cubs and Braves game on cable TV superstations (WGN and WTBS, respectively) helped those teams develop fans outside of their home areas, too.
The Blue Jays seem to have a huge following from all over Canada as well, but that figures since they are the only current MLB team in Canada.
I somewhat question the original premise here though. Are we sure that football has a larger draw for teams outside of their local markets than baseball does? (I’m curious about real numbers here and too lazy to look it up right now.) And are we only restricting the question to the NFL and MLB, or are we including things like college and minor leagues? (I assume we’d have to, since college football is huge while college baseball is often forgotten, and there is no official minor league system for the NFL.)
Baseball is a live sporting event that they put on TV.
Football is a TV show that they hold in front of a live studio audience.
To throw in some maps -
football fans (2018)
baseball fans (2019)
Both look like they’re mostly carved out by region, but football seems more likely to have tiny pockets where the “home team” isn’t the favorite team.
What is SeatGeek, the baseball map looks very off. It doesn’t match the Facebook one at all or many other surveys I’ve seen. I wouldn’t trust it at all.
Yanks are more popular in Tampa than Tampa as an example.
As to my county, Monmouth County, NJ; Phillies are not #1 but #3 after Yanks & Mets.
It’s easier to find access to watching games of remote NFL teams than it is MLB in my experience. If you relocated to Florida and want to see the Packers, Steelers, or Cowboys game each Sunday you can probably find a bar somewhere showing it in addition to any Sunday or Monday night games on national TV they might get.
Trying to watch the regular nightly Brewers or Reds game can be more difficult.
NY times from 2014 - On this map, too, Tampa seems to be the most popular team in Tampa (followed distantly by the Yankees).
I’m from the big swath in the upper left hand corner that is dominated by the Mariners/Seahawks - which seems completely accurate.
It’s a ticket resale site.
Can’t say I agree with the premise. Maybe football is more noticeable because of its “bigger” presence - with huge stadiums and limited number of games, almost every game if not all games carried on national television with multiple national and local pregame and postgame coverage. Baseball doesn’t get anywhere near that focus of coverage until the playoffs.
As others have mentioned, teams like the Braves and Cubs had national TV coverage. There are states with no teams who follow teams in the general regional area. I grew up in MD and I couldn’t even watch the Orioles on TV unless I subscribed to “Home Team Sports” premium cable channel, which I think covered 81 or maybe 90 of 162 games. Braves games were on TV almost every night; I used to watch them while I did my homework. Pretty sure every “Washington Football Team” game was on the local channels you didn’t even need basic cable for. I live in OH now, pretty sure it’s a lot easier to find a Browns game than the 2 MLB teams.
If the premise is correct, I think that also has something to do some of the things I mentioned as well as just culture and maybe more people having favorite football teams than baseball teams. I bet if I asked most adults in my area to name their favorite football team, well the college team would be #1, but without hesitation they’d say Browns, Bengals, Steelers, Giants, whatever. Baseball would have fewer answers or maybe more split allegiances.
So with SeatGeek, they’ll probably be mapping ticket purchases on their secondary market, likely by zip code of the credit card. The Facebook data is normally “liked the page”.
So they’re measuring different things. Seat Geek isn’t going to capture the ex New Yorker who’s moved to Florida for the warmth and goes to spring training games, then watches the team from their screened in pool. Except when they buy Seat Geek tickets to watch the Yanks at the Rays, which is probably going to be picked up as a data point for Tampa.
All I know is that whenever the Cubs were visiting Dodgers Stadium, there were more caps in the crowd with a C on them than LA.
That’s true enough, and the Jays do have a huge following across Canada; but not everybody up here is a Jays fan. I’m in Alberta, and I and most of my friends are Jays fans; but among my friends, I can count one Texas Rangers fan, one Boston Red Sox fan, one Pittsburgh Pirates fan, some NY Yankees fans, and so on. I’m in a small city; I can only imagine that larger Canadian cities (excepting Toronto) would have many more baseball fans who are not Toronto Blue Jays fans.
The NFL also has a huge fanbase up here, but because we have no NFL teams, the teams we individually support make little sense to an American observer. Like I said, I’m in a small Alberta city, but I know local people who are fans of almost every NFL team. I like the 49ers, a friend likes the Bills, another likes the Eagles, still another likes the Broncos, and then there’s the guy whose favourite team is whoever is playing the Patriots. Go figure, but I guess this is what happens when Canada has no NFL team to rally behind, as many Canadians find it easy to do with the Toronto Blue Jays.
When the Cubs play the Rockies in Denver, it’s like 80 - 20 Cubs fans to Rockies fans in Coors Field.
I was in Montreal 4 years ago and saw Blue Jays games were on the TVs and asked the locals if they were now Blue Jays fans, and was told what they really wanted was the Expos back. There’s definitely a nostalgia for the Expos but the feeling I get is most Canadians would still root for the Toronto Blue Jays over any American team.
I’ve known Yankees, Phillies, and Dodgers fans in Toronto. There are always people anywhere who choose exceptions to root for.
The places in English Canada where you might not find the Blue Jays are the majority choice are Windsor, where people tend to root for Detroit’s teams, and the Atlantic provinces, where the Red Sox remain very popular.
As stucco points out, Quebec is a different case, being a place abandoned by MLB. Montreal is a big market (it is, by way of comparison, a bigger market than Denver) and really should have a team, but lacks a proper stadium and an owner willing to build one.
Baseball has farm teams - local teams that develop local area fans who will also watch the local MLB team (and follow a player who moves up to the MLB). Football recruits from colleges across the country - no local connection.
A baseball team’s farm teams are sometimes geographically proximate but not always; there are always many examples where they’re really not close to their major league affiliate and are in a different TV market, or in some cases are actually more local to a different team.
The oddest case, to me anyway, is that there is no AAA baseball in southern California. There isn’t an AAA team anywhere near it. The Dodgers’ affiliate is halfway across the country, in Oklahoma; the Padres are affiliated with El Paso, which is awfully far, and the Angels with Salt Lake City, which is almost as far as El Paso. Given the weather and population in SoCal you’d think there would be room for a Triple A team.
Also, every few years there is a shuffle of minor league affiliates. OKC used to be the Texas Rangers Triple A team.