Toronto Is One Of The Politest Clubhouses In Baseball
A Shared Vocabulary
Thirty clubs, hundreds of players, and a song list running from Vicente Fernández to Rage Against The Machine. Across all of it, only ten different words finish first anywhere in the league. “One” alone tops eleven clubs. Strip a song to its content words and what’s left is the same handful of syllables that carries nearly all of popular music: one, time, way, love, never.
However, some teams do have their own distinct musical taste. Arizona and Houston each run five Spanish words through their top fifteen. Cleveland is the only club in baseball with “woo.” Washington puts three unprintable words inside its top seven. Philadelphia’s list runs so deep that its fifteenth-place word appears in more songs than the number-one word of half the league. And the Dodgers share just five of the eleven core words, holding out instead for “run,” “best,” and “tryna.”
Pick your club above and you’ll almost certainly find “one,” “time” and “love” near the top. Whatever else is sitting in that list is the part that actually belongs to them.
Methodology
Walk-up songs for current MLB players were collected from WalkUpDB, giving each player’s song title, artist and club. Lyrics for every unique song were retrieved through the official Genius API.
English, Spanish and Portuguese stop-word lists were applied, since the songs are multilingual, along with filler words such as “yeah”, “oh” and “la”. Words were counted once per song rather than once per occurrence. A word therefore ranks highly only by appearing across many different songs, not by being repeated in one chorus. Counts were totaled league-wide and again for each club, based on the songs belonging to that club’s players.
Profanity and slurs appear in the underlying data and are reported here in masked form.
You can see the full dataset here.
