Cardinals Have Best Local Fan Base, According to Nielsen

Oct 28, 2013; St. Louis, MO, USA; St. Louis Cardinals fans Dean Anderson (left) and son Dallas Anderson (middle) and stepson Tyler Shears of Peters , MO wave in Ballpark Village prior to game five of the MLB baseball World Series against the Boston Red Sox at Busch Stadium. Anderson sold his World Series tickets to go to the St. Louis Rams football game on Monday night. Mandatory Credit: Eileen Blass-USA TODAY Sports

Fans of all the other teams would really like to stop hearing about how the Cardinals have the best fans in America. It’s annoying, and anyway it’s scientifically unprovable.

Go ahead, prove to me that the Cardinals actually have the best fan base in all of baseball. Cite some evidence. Produce some data.

Oh wait. Nielsen. Nielsen has proof that the Cardinals have the best fan base.

How does one actually determine this? One means is to ask how involved the people in a given metro area are with their particular team. If you can determine the percentage of people in that metro area who in some way consumed the team’s product, you have yourself a legit measure of that local fan base’s loyalty.

The Nielsen nerds crunched all the numbers and concluded that 76% of people in the St. Louis metro area watched, listened to or went to a Cardinals game in the past 12 months. And that is the highest percentage of involvement for any local fan base in America.

It actually was the highest percentage by a fairly wide margin. The Reds local base came in second at 69%. The Tigers were third at 68%. Those awesome loyal insufferable Red Sox fans were fourth at 66%. Brewers fans were fifth at 65%.

So basically, the middle of the country is where all the loyal fan bases are, with the one exception of Boston which we know is a baseball-crazy town. I’m sure there’s some explanation for this geographical oddity. Maybe it’s because those northern type towns have nasty winters so people really like getting out in the summer and going to ballgames?

And of course there’s St. Louis which isn’t really northern. But people just really love baseball. So yeah Cardinals fans. Go ahead. Celebrate yourselves. You are the best fans in baseball. Science has proven it.

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