The Harris Poll^® #21, April 16, 2003

Yankees Top Braves As Nation’s Most Popular Major League Baseball Team

Following them are the Mets, the Indians and the Twins.
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As the 2003 baseball season gets under way, a new Harris Poll finds that the New York Yankees are the nation’s most popular baseball team, followed by the Atlanta Braves. These two teams have a substantial lead over all other clubs, as they have done in every survey like this that we have conducted since 1993.

Apart from the Yankees and the Braves, the next most popular teams are the New York Mets, the Cleveland Indians and the Minnesota Twins. Other teams which make it into the top ten are (in descending order): the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the San Francisco Giants and the Cincinnati Reds.

Apart from the two Canadian teams (whose support is predictably low as the survey was limited to residents of the United States) the teams with the smallest numbers of fans are the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Chicago White Sox, the Kansas City Royals and the Florida Marlins.

This is the first time that we have conducted this survey since 1999. The most dramatic change since then has been the rise of the New York Yankees and the decline of the Atlanta Braves. In every survey between 1993 and 1999, the Braves topped the Yankees, usually by quite a wide margin. This is the first of these Harris Polls to show the Yankees ahead.

Other notable changes since 1999 include:

• The New York Mets moving up from twelfth place to third place.
  
• The Minnesota Twins rising from eleventh to fifth place.
  
• The Chicago Cubs dropping from third to seventh place.
  
• The San Francisco Giants rising from twenty-sixth place to ninth place.
  
• The Baltimore Orioles fall from ninth place to eighteenth place.

It is noteworthy that winning the World Series or winning a pennant does not catapult teams to the top of the list, although it surely helps. Last year’s World champions, the Anaheim Angels, are only in sixteenth place, and the San Francisco Giants, the runners-up, and are in ninth place.

In addition to being attracted to champions, baseball fans seem to be drawn to specific players, and the players’ superstardom translates into support of entire teams. For example, St. Louis ranked higher when Mark Maguire was breaking the home run record, and San Francisco has moved up recently due to the unprecedented success of Barry Bonds.

Although the top two teams (the Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees) both won the World Series in the 90s, they also consistently field good teams, receive a lot more television exposure, and, most importantly, have huge stars and even bigger payrolls. The smaller cities with fewer stars, lower payrolls and less media exposure generally seem to rank lower in our poll, regardless of how they fare during the baseball season. Not surprisingly, seven of the top ten most popular teams in this Harris Poll are also on the list of the top ten highest payrolls.

These are the results of The Harris Poll^®, a nationwide survey of 943 adults who follow professional baseball. This sample is part of an overall nationwide cross section of 3,278 adults who were surveyed online between March 27 and 31, 2003, by the same methods used by Harris Interactive to predict the 2000 elections with great accuracy.

Humphrey Taylor is the chairman of The Harris Poll, Harris Interactive.

"What is your favorite major league baseball team?"

Base: Follow major league baseball

Rank order is based on the actual number of "votes" for each team, even where the percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.
NA = "Not asked" as these clubs were not, then, major league baseball teams.
* = Less than 0.5%.
** It should be noted that the sample was limited to the United States. It is therefore no surprise that the two Canadian teams place last on this list in surveys where no Canadian residents are surveyed.
1 –previously "California Angels"

The Harris Poll^® was conducted online within the United States between March 27 and 31, 2003 among a nationwide cross section of 3,278 adults (ages 18+), of which 943 said they follow major league baseball. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, region and education were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. "Propensity score" weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.

In theory, with a probability sample of this size, one can say with 95 percent certainty that the results for the overall sample of 3,278 have a statistical precision of plus or minus two percentage points, and for the 943 who follow MLB, the statistical precision is plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would be if the entire adult population had been polled with complete accuracy. Unfortunately, there are several other possible sources of error in all polls or surveys that are probably more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. They include refusals to be interviewed (non-response), question wording and question order, interviewer bias, weighting by demographic control data and screening (e.g., for likely voters). It is impossible to quantify the errors that may result from these factors. And this online survey is not a probability sample.

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