Neither Yankees Nor Red Sox Cited As MLB’s Most Hated Team. Whaaaaa?

Maybe your individual answer varies based on personal bias, but if you had asked me who was the objectively most disliked team in baseball, I would, without question, answer “the Yankees” or “the Red Sox.” The reasons are obvious: recent success coupled with a media tendency to pretend that they are the only two teams that matter or exist. And God forbid they’re actually playing each other, because you’ll never hear about anything else.↵

↵↵But no! Turns out it is the Cleveland Indians who are raising more hackles than anyone else in baseball, at least according to an algorithm created by Nielsen Co. that charts positive and negative reactions about each team on the Internet. Perhaps not the most scientifically ideal way of analyzing this sort of thing, but, hey, it’s something professional looking to point at when you want to give an Indians fan some grief.↵

↵↵On a scale that goes from -5 to 5, the Indians rated as the least liked team in Major League Baseball with a score of 0.9. In fairness the Red Sox (2nd) and the Yankees (5th) do appear in the bottom 5 as well. Of course, we have to consider that the Yankees have a large enough fan following that their positive mentions could conceivably cancel a lot of negative scores given out by other fans. Also, perhaps the enmity against Chief Wahoo racial caricature was greater than I imagined. It certainly can’t be success that people are holding against the team. Perhaps it was Travis Hafner killing them in fantasy baseball over the last few years. Who can say?↵

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