CNN
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Welcome to Trend Line, weekly installments on sports trends and what’s trending.
This week we’re talking about baseball sports and people who are truly American teams. We are trained to think that American baseball teams are Yankees who consider all the successes of the 20th century.
But it is in the past, and this is now.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, the real-life World Series champion, are the one we’re talking to now.
So let’s start with a big upward point.
Baseball differs from soccer in that it is much more localized. Even the best team games are not usually featured on national television.
However, Google searches allow you to grasp the team’s national sentiment. Many people are looking for Dodgers on Google, and more people than other dating backs since 2004 (when Google started tracking searches).
The Dodgers aren’t just breaking their records. They also traditionally beat the Yankees who have been the top team in Google searches and beat the Dodgers in search traffic this May before this May.
And yes, the Dodgers have also beaten the San Francisco giants, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Rams on Google searches. They are clearly the top of their state and town.
One thing I always talk about in Google searches is that I liked watching them get backed up in the real world, not just in the computer screen.
That’s definitely the case with the Dodgers. They have attracted over 50,000 fans so far this season to the average home game. The Yankees are the closest to the next, attracting less than 43,000 fans per home game.
In fact, there’s no team that attracted at least 50,000 fans per home game, as the Yankees and New York Mets did it in 2008. We spoke nearly 20 years ago.
The Dodgers themselves averaged 50,000 fans per game, never once. If the Dodgers continue at their current pace, they will be the top of the 4 million mark of total attendance for the first time in history.
There’s one thing you can do to appear in Home Fans. Getting fans on the road is a whole other thing.
This is something the Yankees have been doing well on a continuous basis. Whether it’s from fans traveling from Los Angeles or having a fan base for enemies city fans coming out for you, road attendance is a way to understand the wide range of appeal.
This year, the Dodgers have broken the pace they set through 29 road games last season, becoming their first team since the 2008 season, averaging over 36,000 fans per road game.
On average, the Yankees are only drawn in about 31,000, even if they don’t count the games played at Minor League Stadiums (Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays) or early season games played in cold weather Detroit. Counting these games, the Yankees averaged less than 25,000 people in road games.
On the bottom line, the Dodgers are not the Yankees but the American baseball team. They have actually won the World Series over the past 15 years, making fans more interested and more fans appear in the game.
Of course, the Yankees will give a big boost to their road attendance this weekend when they visit the Dodgers. Now it’s a good baseball.