Alright so today I got curious about which MLB teams actually get the most hate – saw this poll floating around online and wanted to dig into the actual numbers myself. Figured it’d be interesting to see what fans really think instead of just guessing.
Getting Started
First thing I did was fire up my laptop around coffee time this morning. Typed in the search like always – nothing fancy, just hunting for recent fan polls about hated baseball teams. Found a couple from bigger sports sites but noticed something weird right away:
- The results didn’t match up between polls at all
- Most polls had like zero info on how they collected votes
- Some rankings felt totally random – like a team with three World Series wins was ranked “most hated” which makes zero sense
Making My Own Approach
Decided to do it proper. Found five decent-sized fan surveys from this month and copied all the raw rankings into a spreadsheet. My dumb fingers messed up copying twice but third time’s the charm. Then I did the boring part:
- Standardized all the ratings to a 1-10 scale (seriously, why do polls use different number scales?)
- Kicked out obvious joke votes like “every team 100/10 hate”
- Calculated average hate scores for every single team
Got coffee stain on my notes halfway through but hey, adds character.
Facing Some Realities
When the numbers finally crunched, it wasn’t some dramatic revelation. Top of the hate list? Naturally it’s the recent dynasty teams. Turns out winning a lot makes everyone else mad – who knew? Bottom were mostly small-market teams nobody pays attention to.
But here’s what nobody talks about: the so-called “rankings” are total nonsense outside the top and bottom few teams. The middle 20 teams? Their “hate scores” were separated by like 0.2 points. Means nothing. And depending which polls I included, the order flipped completely.
By lunchtime I realized these rankings exist purely for arguments. My beautiful spreadsheet basically proved there’s no real consensus beyond “don’t like teams that keep winning.” Felt like digging a hole just to fill it back up.
Still finished the spreadsheet though. Old habit. Might even stare at it again tomorrow and sigh dramatically.
