“Save Our Spikes”: Social Media Advocacy and Fan Reaction to the End of Minor League Baseball

Abstract

On October 18, 2019, The New York Times reported that Major League Baseball was eliminating more than 40 teams from its minor league system. Fourteen months later, some teams permanently ceased operations when contraction became official. During those 14 months, fans and community members joined advocacy campaigns to save their teams. Given how minor league fans have unique, community-based identities, social media may help them communicate support for their teams during a threat. Using a framework of social media advocacy, the study sought to (1) understand the advocacy efforts present on social media and (2) the tone and emotions manifest in tweets related to contraction. Using quantitative methods, the study found that most discussions of contraction were negative in tone and contained emotions like anger. The most often used advocacy strategy was information, which may have been a lost opportunity for fans to rally support. As time moved on, tweets contained less negativity, more sadness than anger, and more use of the community advocacy strategy, providing evidence that fans found contraction inevitable. The study makes a contribution by bringing advocacy communication into the discussion of sport fandom and uses social media data to extract fan emotions during identity threats.