Fan Base Leaderboard Update: NL East

Well, it’s shaping up to be another mind-numbingly predictable season. Orioles atop the AL East…Rays throwing grapefruits…Reds offense punchless…Pujols disappointing yet again…all-too-familiar names atop the leaderboards…Omar Infante…Jake Westbrook…yawn. Wake me when something happens, will you? But do you know what we do, here at NotGraphs, when suspense is at a premium? We manufacture some, that’s what. I present to you today a leaderboard heretofore never seen: a collection of stats that go beyond mere on-field performance to assess the vitality of a team’s entire culture. Could this completely revolutionize baseball analysis? That’s not for me to say, but yeah, probably.

So I took all the comments from each open game thread on each team’s SB Nation Blog, and I put them in a big-ass text file and crunched it. Here I give you the NL East, with a few of the key metrics picked out. I hardly need to draw your attention to the insights to be gleaned from this table, the questions it raises and the truths it reveals. Why are Braves fans so wordy? Why are Fish fans so clean? Is there a dictionary shortage in Queens? Discuss, readers, and let’s talk about where to go from here.

U: Number of users

Cm/G: Average number of comments per game

W/Cm: Average word count per comment

Ch/W: Average number of characters per word (NOTE: this is DIRECTLY CORRELATED with intelligence!)

FB/G: Average number of F-bombs per game