As the leaves begin to change, the baseball world turns the page to the postseason. Eight teams enter with one walking away with some
hardware and the title World Champion.
The first pitch will be thrown on Wednesday night, but between now and then, everyone and their mother will make a playoff prediction. Instead of relying on tried and true metrics like home vs. away splits or how the teams will finish, I decided to use social media buzz.
The report was conducted similar to my report of NFL preseason buzz a month or so ago. The difference is that the end game is much sooner with the MLB playoffs and the buzz was relevant as teams chased the pennant.
So who do you think won (in case you didn’t read the title)?
If you are from the Big Apple, you can rejoice knowing that your Bronx Bombers will take home their 28th World Championship.
Below is the full report for the eight playoff teams.
What do you think of this report? Would love to hear your thoughts below.
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Was Social Buzz able to tell me when the Mets will be competitive? Ugh!
I shook the magic eight ball and Joe Torre came up a bunch of times.
Incredible study, Jeff. Really impressive how in-depth you have gone with this report. I mean, the overview alone would have been great, but with the full deck explaining the methods and measurement, this offers a really good, real-world case study for using social media to predict trends, outcomes and event sentiment.
Now, there’s something: predicting event sentiment. Could a sports team, say, the Red Sox, take this data and analysis and use it to help predict what kind of sentiment they are going to get around a specific signing, or an announcement.
Granted, with many sports teams, they already know that a firing of a bad coach/manager (such as the Mets’ Jerry Manuel) is going to elicit negative buzz, but what about the neutral/positive buzz and the sentiment that “Hey, we’re moving on to better days now.” That’s far more difficult for a team to predict, and more importantly, begin to rebuild their brand from.
Interesting to consider. Again, great study and thanks for sharing!
Thanks Keith, teams can most definitely use social buzz to see what the feedback will be both positive and/or negatively. I also think that Mets fans are probably happy with the firings of the manager/GM tandem.
One thing that I want to figure out is if there is a way to discount or even the playing field by market size. NY has a larger number than smaller markets but you can’t say if it is all coming from said market. So it may just come down to who is more popular in the space which was the thesis of this whole report.
I will be interested to see if my predictions come through in the coming months.