The Nationals could use some more friends.
The Nationals might be second-best in the National League East through the first five games of the season, but when it comes to online popularity, they’re dead last in all of Major League Baseball. D.C. Sportsbog notes that last week, a pair of baseball blogs compiled the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers for all 30 teams.
And the Nats were 30th in both rankings. On Facebook, only 139,034 people “like” the team that brought baseball back to the nation’s capital. Contrast that with the Yankees, with over 5.3 million “likes.”
Actually, forget the Yankees. Sportsbog weighed the Nationals Facebook popularity against the other teams in the N.L. East. By fudging the numbers a bit, the blog was able to argue that the New York Mets are the least popular team on social media relative to the population of the city in which they play, but only when counting a Marist College poll finding that only 30 percent of New Yorkers are Mets fans.
But in terms of raw numbers, the Nats are anemic when it comes to connecting with their social-media-gadfly fans. On Twitter, arguably a better channel for distributing real-time sports information, Washington lags with only 31,788 followers as of this writing. The most-followed team? Not the Yankees. In fact, it’s a team more directly bothersome to the Nats—the Philadelphia Phillies, with more than 682,000 followers. That’s nearly 45 percent of the total population of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Just a shade over 5 percent of the D.C. region is represented in the Nats’ Twitter horde.
Come on, Nats fans. There are plenty of reasons to cozy up to the team on Twitter and Facebook. For starters, they just dealt the Mets their first loss of the season last night, Stephen Strasburg is looking strong, opening day is tomorrow and the hungriest fans are about to confront the epic eight-pound Strasburger.
What’s not to follow or “like”?
Disclosure: The author of this article is an unabashed Yankees fan, though he does not “like” them on Facebook. He does, however, follow them on Twitter.
