Yankees Still Baseball's Most-Hated Team, FiveThirtyEight Survey Finds

This might be shocking news, but the New York Yankees still are the most-hated team in Major League Baseball.

OK, so you’re probably not exactly blown away, but a recent survey by FiveThirtyEight did show that the Yankees’ exciting young core hasn’t done anything for the team’s image. In fact, they were the only club in the survey that wound up with more unfavorable respondents than favorable ones.

FiveThirtyEight used SurveyMonkey for the poll, so the results aren’t the most scientific, but they do give some rather interesting insight into the minds of baseball fans. Participants were asked their favorite and least favorite teams overall and also were asked to rate each team as favorable or unfavorable. Nate Silver’s website broke the results down by region, too.

The Yankees were America’s favorite team by a slim margin, garnering 10 percent of all respondents. Three teams came in right behind them, as the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves all had 8 percent of the vote. The Toronto Blue Jays (unsurprisingly) had the least support as America’s favorite team with less than 1 percent.

Regionally, the Yankees took the Northeast with 28 percent of voters in the area, followed closely by the Red Sox at 25 percent. The Braves took the South, the Cubs won the Midwest and unfortunately for Los Angeles Dodgers fans, the San Francisco Giants were the favorite team in the West by two percentage points.

When it came to unfavorable teams, the Yankees had a monopoly on hate. They were the least favorite team with 27 percent of the total vote, and although the rival Red Sox came in right behind them, Boston had just 10 percent of the vote. New York was the most-hated team in every region and had the highest unfavorable rating, with 48 percent of all respondents saying they had a negative opinion of the club. The Cubs had the highest percentage of favorable votes and the highest net favorability, with 67 percent liking the team and just 14 percent disliking it. The Red Sox had the next highest favorability rating at 56 percent but came in fourth in net favorability with a 28 percent unfavorability rating.

You can check out all the results at FiveThirtyEight.com, and there definitely are some surprises in there.