On Monday, in what may have been the least surprising news in baseball since Babe Ruth hit his umpteenth homer, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt filed for bankruptcy protection.
In more predictable news, it also turns out that the interwebs has an opinion on the matter.
According to the aptly-named Twitter Sentiment app, which uses various algorithms to gauge positive and negative public sentiment surrounding keywords across the web, 62% of the feelings expressed around the phrase ‘Dodgers bankruptcy’ were positive and 38% were negative. A search for ‘Dodgers’ returns an almost evenly split 51% negative and 49% positive divide.
Conversely, Twitrratr registered 85% neutral sentiment around the phrase ‘Dodgers’, along with 8.07% positive sentiment and 6.28% negative. And, interestingly, whatdoestheinternetthink.com showed an overwhelmingly 84% negative opinion about the phrase ‘Dodgers’ in the wake of the news, a number the site came to by crawling Google for sentiment.
So, sarcastically shockingly enough, the interwebs might not agree on what exactly the public sentiment surrounding this announcement is — even when competing bots are crawling the same set of search results. But, at least we have sports commentators to tell us what we should really think. And fortunately, a lot of them weighed in on Twitter after the news broke.
My personal favorite? Blogger Mike Petriello‘s reaction: “As a Dodger fan, this whole mess is beyond embarrassing, but as a blogger I do appreciate all of the quality material it generates.”
