With baseball luxuriating in its mid-season break, there’s no better time to check the buzz health of our nominal national pastime. Due to the sheer number of games and a lack of meaningful matchups until September, the MLB has been surpassed in buzz this year by the World Cup, the babes of Wimbledon, and heck, even the UFC. As sports fans get ready to turn their attention to NFL training camps, has baseball fouled out in Search?
Not quite, but interest in the sport is focused in the rabid nexus of the Northeast—Philly, Boston, and New York make up the bulk of MLB queries. Chicago, St. Louis, and resurgent Detroit also factor into metro searches on baseball, but the sport draws huge blanks in the Southeast and even out West. Right now the top four teams in Buzz are…
The reviled Bronx Bombers continue to outpace clubs in Buzz. Is it because of A-Rod, Jeter, or somnambulant skipper Joe Torre? Nah, it’s because there’s an incessant pressure to win every year coupled with the heightened scrutiny of playing in the Big Apple. Derek Jeter tops player searches right now, but the Yankee captain can’t measure up to searches on other buzz-worthy gamers from other sports. NBA players (Wade, Kobe, Iverson) and soccer stars (Beckham, Ronaldinho, and Zidane) draw from an international fan base that baseball superstars don’t have and they all net at least triple the searches Jeter gets.
That said, searches on baseball’s All-Star Game and the glorified batting practice that is the Home Run Derby rounded the bases of the Buzz during the break, with both events breaking into our top 10 sports searches. But it’ll be interesting to see if the second half of baseball’s slog to October provides the sort of drama that feeds buzz.
