The New York Mets are currently sitting at second place in the National League East, but they’re No. 1 by a huge margin when it comes to having awful command of the English language.
In April, the Wall Street Journal reached out to Grammarly to evaluate NFL fan bases on their grammar, spelling and punctuation. The findings deemed that Redskins fans were the worst.
WSJ is back, this time doing the study on Major League Baseball fans, and the numbers are astounding. According to Grammarly, the fans of the New York Mets have a lot of studying to do.
It reviewed 150 reader comments from the news section of each team website—10,592 total words, on average, per team. Mets fans had the most errors, making 13.9 mistakes per 100 words. It’s quite fitting considering the team’s unofficial slogans in past World Series years—“Ya Gotta Believe” (1973) and “Baseball Like It Oughta Be” (1986)—were littered with typographical errors.
Philadelphia fans won’t be pleased, as they came in right behind the Mets on the bad grammar list.
The second-most mistake-prone fan base belonged to the Mets’ NL East rival Philadelphia Phillies. These results should come as no surprise to anyone who has sat in the upper deck of a late-night Mets-Phillies game. Typically, by the seventh inning of these games, the rival fan groups have forgone the English language to grunt and throw peanuts at each other.
Despite the Mets and Phillies, fans of National League teams made fewer mistakes than those of the American League. Other fan bases have clearly benefited from not staying up late on school nights in October. The five teams with the best grammar and spelling (Indians, Padres, White Sox, Mariners, Cubs) root for teams that have collectively won four titles in the past 100 years.
Here’s the complete breakdown: