Fan Misery Index

In our recent posts, we have looked at the winning percentage for each of the thirteen 4-sport cities over the past five years. We also briefly described how this 5-year city winning percentage is just one aspect of a larger concept defined as the Fan Misery Index (FMI).

Our initial conclusion based on this single component of fan misery was that Detroit sports fans were perfectly justified in feeling that their fan experience over the past five years was indeed the most miserable. We also stated that no other city’s misery was even close. Well, one might argue that there are other cities that should be considered in terms of their misery even if they don’t field a team in all four of the major sports. Although comparing four-sport cities with three-sport cities is not an “apple to apple” comparison (yes, we have a footnote here),¹ we thought it would still be an interesting exercise to see what the data reveals.

Currently, there are nine cities that have one sports team competing in three of the four major professional sports leagues—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Refer to Table 2 in the link provided for a list of these nine cities and their corresponding sports teams. Even though it is currently a 3-sport city, Seattle is not included in this analysis as the Kraken have only been in existence for two years.  Thus, Table A provides the winning percentage for the thirteen 4-sport cities as well as each of the eight 3-sport cities over the past five seasons. The winning percentage is calculated by taking the average winning percentage across all that city’s sports teams over the past five years. The cities are listed in descending order according to their winning percentage. So, in terms of fan misery, the further down the list equates to higher levels of misery.

4-Sport City	Average Winning %	3-Sport City	Average Winning %
		Milwaukee	.632
Boston	.607
		Tampa Bay	.601
		Toronto	.579
Philadelphia	.546
Los Angeles	.540
		Pittsburgh	.537
Minneapolis	.532
Denver	.532
Dallas	.529
Miami	.523
San Francisco	.520
New York	.489
		Charlotte	.481
		Cleveland	.479
		Atlanta	.474
		Houston	.469
Washington DC	.468
Chicago	.465
Phoenix	.459
Detroit	.364

Table A: Winning % over the past five years for 4-sport cities and 3-sport cities

Several observations pop out when looking at the data for 3-sport cities and comparing it to that of the 4-sport cities. First, even though we would expect that 3-sport cities would have greater variability in their winning percentages (higher highs and lower lows), we observe this variability only on the high side. The worst winning percentage for 3-sport cities is Houston at .469. This puts them in the same group as Washington DC, Chicago, and Phoenix, but still much higher than that of Detroit. Second, and not much talked about in the national conversation, is that the city of Milwaukee has had an incredible five-year run. Tampa Bay has also had a nice run, very similar to that of Boston. More on these and other “non-misery” city and team experiences will be discussed in future articles. Finally, the dismal .364 winning percentage posted by Detroit teams over the past five years continues to amaze at how robustly bad they have been relative to comparable and closely comparable cities. The robustness, or lack of, this dreary winning percentage will be the topic of our next two articles.

As an aside, in casual conversations regarding our work on the FMI with a variety of people, we often hear the sentiment that Cleveland fans have had the roughest go of it. Perhaps additional analysis may bear this out, but in regard to the most recent five-year daily misery component of the FMI, Cleveland has had it better than six other cities in this list.

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¹ Two reasons: (a) a statistical phenomenon known as “regression toward the mean” where extreme outcomes tend to be followed by more moderate outcomes.  This suggests that since four-sport teams have more data points, they will tend to have winning percentages closer to the mean than those of three-sport teams; and (b) the mean winning percentage in baseball, football, and basketball is .500.  This is not true for hockey because of the way hockey treats tie games at the end of regulation.  In fact, the mean winning percentage across all hockey teams is roughly .550.  Therefore, three-sport cities with hockey teams will have a higher probability of a higher winning percentage than those that don’t have a hockey team.