Which MLB Teams Does Your Town Root For? NYT Interactive Has Answers

Last month, when we showed you the most accurate map of MLB fandom, it was the most accurate in that it was based on the most accurate data. In the time since, the New York Times has gotten its hands on that data and made this interactive, which is awesome.

The Times's writeup of the project is here, while the interactive is found here. The full map is above, and doesn't look too different from what Facebook produced, but the fun is once you start to zoom in. Essentially, the Times has broken down the Facebook data by zip code, and more broadly by county, and created an interactive map that lets you push in as far as you want to see where your area's rooting allegiances lie. Here's who the jerks who live near the Gawker office root for, for example:

You might notice that the entirety of the tri-state area is Yankee-grey. That's because the Mets don't rank first in a single damn zip code. Even right near Citi Field, the best the Mets can muster is a 28 percent to 48 percent slaughtering, with the zip code the stadium is actually listed in coming in at 53 percent to 25 percent, Yankees. In most areas in the city, Red Sox fans are closer to Mets fans than Mets fans are to Yankees fans.

The Times also put together a bunch of rivalry maps. Some show a similar kind of dominance, like the Giants crushing the A's in the Bay Area:

That small pocket of A's holdouts in Los Altos could be the ground softening after all the talk of moving the team to the south bay—or it could just be idle noise, since it just represents a few points of difference (60 percent Giants, 11 percent A's in 94022, versus ~62 percent/9 percent) in the surrounding areas.

There are other fun bits, like the actual line of demarcation of Sox/Yanks, or the Astros' little annexation in the middle of Rangers country, or the stronghold of White Sox fans holding out in broader Cubs territory:

The best thing the Times did, though, was check these against its massively popular regional dialect quiz (Josh Katz shares a byline on both projects; fellow co-author here Kevin Quealy also worked on the last year), to give us, uhm, Mets Fans Who Eat Hoagies:

Going through the whole interactive is absolutely worth your time. You'll find some weird little quirks, like the fact that the assholes in my hometown, basically in the middle of Pennsylvania, are on the verge of flipping to Yankees fans (and the guys a few miles over already have).

This is probably the coolest sports interactive that's come out recently, and I don't think anyone would be mad if the Times just went ahead and did this every time Facebook runs out one of its data dumps.

[ New York Times]