The Survey



Fan opinions about MLB's Pride Night events

In 2019, 27 Major League Baseball teams hosted a Pride Night or Pride Day event, and one more hosted a "Rememberance of Stonewall" event. These events are marketed as promoting inclusiveness and diversity in the fan base, and designed to reach an untapped base of potential fans. But are they having the desired effect?


We asked fans to share their opinions of Pride Night. Would they go to a Pride game? Have they been to one before? What do they think of the concept overall?

Surveys were sourced from MLB generic fan Facebook groups, Reddit subs, and Twitter (as opposed to ones focused on any single team). We collected over 800 responses; the results are visualized in the interactive dashboards below. Hover or click the features to focus on specific responses or teams.


Most visualizations focus on teams where we recieved more than 25 responses. Hover or click on elements to focus on specific teams or responses.

Observations:

  • Among fans who identified as LGBTQ+, Pride Night was a determining factor when deciding whether or not to attend a game.
  • Among most fans who did not identify as LGBTQ+, Pride Night had no influence on the choice of game. Most fans in this category would use other factors such as opponent, weather or special discounts when deciding whether or not to attend this game.
  • For a small number of fan bases, however, Pride Night was a factor in determining whether to avoid attending a game. Those teams had a relatively small number of fans that identified as LGBTQ+, when compared to other teams' fan bases.
  • Most teams' fans had a largely neutral response with either a secondary positive or secondary negative response; few teams had strong positive and negative responses together. In other words, while the topic is polarizing across the larger MLB fan base, the smaller single-team fan bases tend to trend either positive or negaitve rather than being split.

As expected, Pride Night is a polarizing topic that is more popular among members of the LGBTQ+ community than it is outside it, but the level of polarity was unexpected. This more or less mirrors the Twitter sentiment analysis in this project, and the level of fan input and the positive and negative trends between teams mostly correspond.