CNN
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Welcome to Trendlines, your weekly installment of what’s trending up and what’s trending down in sports.
This week we’re talking about the sport of baseball and who is really America’s team. We’re trained to think America’s baseball team is the Yankees given all of their success in the 20th century.
But that was the past, and this is now.
The reigning World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers are who we’re talking about now.
So let’s start with a big upswing.
Baseball differs from football in that baseball is far more regionalized. Even the best teams’ games aren’t usually put on national television.
Google searches, however, allow us to capture the national sentiment of a team. More people are searching for the Dodgers on Google this May than any other dating back since 2004 (when Google started tracking searches).
The Dodgers aren’t just beating their own records, though. They’re also beating the Yankees, who have traditionally been a top team in Google searches and had beaten the Dodgers in search traffic in every May before this one.
And yes, the Dodgers are beating the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Rams in Google searches as well. They’re clearly the top of their state and town, too.
One of the things I always talk about with Google searches is I liked to see them backed up in the real world and not just on the computer screen.
That’s definitely the case with the Dodgers. They’re drawing more than 50,000 fans to their average home game so far this season. The Yankees are the next closest, and they’re pulling in fewer than 43,000 fans per home game.
Indeed, no team has pulled in at least 50,000 fans per home game since the Yankees and New York Mets did it in 2008. We’re talking about nearly 20 years ago.
The Dodgers themselves have never averaged at least 50,000 fans per game. If the Dodgers continue at their current pace, they’ll top the 4 million mark for total attendance for the first time ever in their history.
Being able to get your home fans to come out is one thing. Getting fans on the road is something else entirely.
This is something the Yankees have continuously done well. Whether it be from fans traveling from Los Angeles or having a fan base so large that fans in opponents’ cities come out for you, road attendance is a way to understand broad appeal.
This year, the Dodgers are beating the pace they set last season through 29 road games when they eventually became the first team since the 2008 season to average more than 36,000 fans per road game.
The Yankees, for comparison, are pulling in only about 31,000 on average, even when you don’t count games played in minor league stadiums (the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays) or early season games played in cold weather Detroit. Counting those games, the Yankees have averaged fewer than 25,000 coming out for their road games.
The bottom line is the Dodgers are America’s baseball team, not the Yankees. They’ve actually won a World Series in the last 15 years, have greater fan interest and more fans coming out to their games.
Of course, the Yankees will see a big boost this weekend for their road attendance as they visit the Dodgers. Now, that’s good baseball.
