This is the Best Thing Online Today

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These Facebook data sports fan maps are all the rage lately. There’s already been a baseball one. And a pretty terrible hockey one. But this is the best one.

The New York Times, using data provided by Mark Zuckerberg’s box of your life, put together an interactive Major League Baseball fan map, viewable down to the zip code level. ZIP CODE. You can spend an hour looking at this thing and still feel like there’s more you want to uncover, so I’ll just point you in the direction of the map. But, if you want the quicky and dirty, here’s the Philly-New York dividing line:

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Also interesting on this map is that the Northest-Bucks-Montco corridor – the areas north and west of the city – and South Jersey, contain the highest density of Phillies fans. Somewhere, Delco hangs its head.

The New York Times does a lot of this sort of thing, and it’s always pretty outstanding. They convey information in new and unique ways. Meanwhile, Philly.com is still using giant blocks of text so it looks like a newspaper online!

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22 Responses

  1. Have you actually read the NY Times online? They make it look as close to their actual paper as they can.

  2. According to this map the Mets have fans, which instantly refutes it’s authenticity.

  3. By your logic more Phillies fans live in the outlying suburbs than in the 5th most populated city in the country, with exception of the surburban-esque layout of the northeast used to bolster your argument. Seems legit.

  4. This is a total BS map, I live in Hamilton right next to Trenton, and we may have NY fans there, it mostly Philly fans. I would say the split is 65/35 Philly fans. The trenton area should be a reddish color…

    I hate maps that suck.

  5. Kyle piling on lots of irrelevant posts today to bury the awkward Kacie post that he refuses to address.

    1. That’s how the Shaun White of Philly sports blogs rolls!

      I used to love when Shaun White did the same tricks deadspin did, but an hour later.

    2. It’s True It’s True! Why didn’t he just delete the entire Kacie Post instead of closing it and deleting the comments.

      1. Because kyle still wants the world to know that kacie is aware of him and his tshirts

  6. Faggot suburbs need to stop glomming off our teams. They shit talk the city every chance they get, but they claim our teams as their own. Fuck them all

    1. What the fuck are you talking about? Its clear you have no pulse for the suburbs. Glomming off YOUR teams? What a fucking joke you are. I bet more than half the people at all of these games are from the suburbs.

      I grew up in the subrubs and now live in south philly (right near you, Grays Ferry Greg) and half the people on my block couldnt tell you who Freddy Galvis or Wayne Simmonds is and these are supposed to be the fans, huh?

      Maybe people shit talk you or Port Richmond but never the entire city of Philadelphia or OUR teams. By your logic my dad, mom and oldest brother can be philly sports fans but the rest of my family who grew up in montco can’t be?

      Get a clue, you’d be staring at blue seats all summer at CBP if it werent for the suburbs.

      1. Not our fault no one wants to put any teams where you live. And no one but the team gives a fuck that you to come to the stadium (btw, seen the stands lately? Most of the suburban fairweathers are nowhere to be found) I am wholeheartedly in favor of taxing suburbanites on sports tickets

        1. I live in South Philadelphia, much closer to the stadiums than Port Richmond.

          By the way, a google maps search shows that I grew up approximately 14 minutes from Port Richmond which is 17 minutes from the stadiums. Ha, you live closer to the my childhood suburban home than you do the stadiums.

          Thank you for personifying Port Richmond for me. I always knew it was a shithole.

  7. This is true I think. The Northeast seems to have, unfortunately, gone all in on the Phillies, and the northwestern suburbs are pretty similar to the far Northeast so I’m not surprised there’s overlap. As far as South Jersey goes, they’re closer to the ballpark than probably 90% of the people actually in the city, so I’m not surprised by that either.

    It fits in with Atlanta leaving their relatively-not-old ballpark to build a new one in their suburbs. Baseball is not “dying” as the narrative seems to go, but its core fanbase seems to follow white flight patterns out to the suburbs. I would imagine a similar map for the Eagles would show deep color spots in more working class areas with high white population shares like Tacony and Port Richmond, probably much of Delco, and some areas in South Jersey just west of that bright Phillies spot.

    What I’m getting at is I bet if the Phillies had built Citizens Bank Park 10 or 20 years after they did, it would have been somewhere around the Northeast Philadelphia Airport rather than in the Sports Complex. If Atlanta can be used as a model, teams will be following their base of season ticket holders to the suburbs as long as local governments are willing to build them parks via taxpayer-funded corporate welfare.

    1. If you look at any of the maps for the big cities, the downtown areas have less of a following because that is where people from out of town move to. People from New York who move to Philly don’t live in Mayfair. They live in Center City, South Philly, U City, Fishtown and Northern Liberties.

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