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MLB Grammar Study Plays into Fan-Base Stereotypes

By Josh Sippie

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The Wall Street Journal and Grammarly have published a curious study that sheds a little light on which baseball fans value the English language and which fans see it as a dispensable resource.

Grammarly indicated the the study was done by “looking at all 30 official MLB team sites and analyz[ing] the top 150 comments for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Each team had an average of over 10,000 words.”

The results? Right here:

Well, New York Mets’ fans, looks like you are able to top the Washington Nationals in something.

If you think of the most vocal and/or nasty fans in all of sports, the first two places that should probably come to mind are Philadelphia and New York. According to the study, along with being vocal, nasty and abrasive at times, they also butcher the English language, as they place last, second to last, and fifth to last.

Of course, the east-coast dialect may have a bit to do with it. Not to mention, when being confrontational and typing along the lines of colloquial east-coast language, the spelling and grammar errors will be oozing to the tune of… well, 14 per 100 words. Of course, we hate to base our statements off of stereotypes, but they do exist for a reason.

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There are plenty of other interesting takeaways from the study. Five of the top six teams in the study have losing records. Likewise, it appears that the Midwest is on point with their grammar as six of the top eight teams in grammar reside in the middle of the United States of America.

Contrary to the east coast, where everyone is in a hurry and no one stops to hit the backspace, the greater Midwestern states are traditionally a very polite, proper, and reserved people that know how to kick back and have a good time.

It really is a curious study that sheds some light on fan bases. The Kansas City Royals and Houston Astros, two of the youngest teams in the league and also embodying the term ‘upstart,’ have fanbases that do not exactly pay attention to their typos as well. You could pin that bit to overconfidence in their fan base and having very little regard for what they are saying, so long as they get their point across.

Again, you do not want to read into it too terribly much, but when considering the stereotypes of fan bases, this study plays right into the generalizations that we see every game.

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