Is Baseball America's Game now???

by Spidey on Dec 19, 2010 11:55 AM EST

Google introduced a new app associated with Google Books, and besides tracking the usage of ketchup and catsup I decided to see which has been referenced more, "baseball" or "football". Given how the media talks about how football has supplanted baseball as "America's Game", I was surprised to see the the graphical output.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=football,baseball&corpus=5&smoothing=3&year_start=1900&year_end=2000

The chart shows only the frequency each word is used, and overlooks context. I would agree that professional football has taken the title of "America's Professional Game" from professional baseball, but I could see an argument that the growth of professional football has come at the expense of college football, and not at the expense of professional baseball. Because when you think about it, with baseball attendance at or near historic highs and with overall television viewership at an all-time high, too, I would argue that baseball continues to maintain a strong position within American sports psyche...

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I wouldn’t put too much stock in this. It’s searching for the use of words in books, I think. Not a very good measure of the level of interest. Plus, you can’t tell in what context the word is being used. Put the word “track” in for example, and it beats both baseball and football. Tennis beats baseball for certain decades as well. What would be really interesting is measuring how many people follow certain sports with any regularity. I’m pretty sure that football would win that one. If you want to know who PLAYS which sports, I’d put my money on basketball (certainly for people under 30, anyway, and especially if you include women).

by peter m on Dec 20, 2010 12:55 PM EST reply actions

All true. We have to take it with a grain of salt. Still, “track” can be referenced in many other contexts (such as “track lighting”) and “tennis” too (such as “tennis shoes”). I can’t think of many situations where baseball and football are not used outside of their respective sports.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin

by Spidey on Dec 24, 2010 11:45 AM EST via mobile up reply actions