An Emotional Roller Coaster for Cubs Fans on Opening Day
Posted by M.T. in Emotional Intelligence
Spring has not yet sprung, but just as they have done for the last 137 years, the Boys of Summer began their annual 8-month long marathon of a Major League Baseball season. To kick the season off with a bang, we at Kanjoya decided to have some fun and use Kanjoya Emotional Intelligence “EI” to track America’s favorite lovable losers, the Chicago Cubs. Kanjoya EI is our new, shiny, amazing, revolutionary product that can take almost any topic and analyze emotion within content around that topic in real-time. We are super excited about the power of Kanjoya EI! Since our CEO, Peter Jackson’s, son, Brett, plays for the AAA Iowa Cubs, what better team to track than the Cubbies to have some fun and test the amazing abilities of Kanjoya EI.
So on Wednesday night, on the eve of Opening Day for the Cubs, we took about 5 minutes to setup EI to start tracking the game. First, we needed a solid data source to analyze. What better a source than Twitter, where people from all over the world wax poetically about the Cubbies year round. With the source in place, it was show time! Immediately it was apparent that Cubs fans were dominating the conversation, exuding extreme amounts of Joy about the start of the season and the promise of a World Series Championship for their beloved team in 2012. Not having won baseball’s fall classic, The World Series, since the summer of 1908, the Cubs faithful have had to endure season after season of disappointment, and Opening Day 2012 provided a venue for new hope and promise.
To help provide color to our analysis of Opening Day, the graph above is a snapshot in time of the conversation on Twitter and Kanjoya EI’s analysis of the conversation over an 8 hour period before, during, and after the game. As the Kanjoya EI graph shows, it was a tough day for the Cubs faithful. Taking a 1-0 lead into the top of the 8th inning, on a Marlon Byrd RBI single, the Tweeters were expressing Joy at its highest point of the day! Unfortunately, it would never reach that point again. With 2 outs in the top half of the 8th, new Cubs manager Dale Sveum made his first big decision of 2012, aside, of course, from sending Brett Jackson to the minors to start the season. He pulled Cubs ace Ryan Dempster, despite his stellar performance, from the game. Tensions rose as his replacement, Kerry Wood, took the mound in relief. Sadly, it was a walk in the park for the Nationals, as the nerves of Opening Day took over, and Wood’s mastery of the strike zone was no more. He walked home the tying run, and from there it was off to the races for Tweeters!
Kanjoya EI quickly picked this up as the conversation began to shift and Anger was on the rise, only slightly at first, as Tweeters knew the Cubs still had 6 outs to work with. While Joy still dominated the conversation, the Cubs went down quietly in their half of the 8th. The game was tied at 1 heading into the 9th, as Cubs closer, Carlos Marmol, entered the game. “Closer” was a loosely used term that day, as he promptly gave up a go-ahead, and eventual game winning, single to Washington Nationals shortstop Ian Desmond. Following this inept display of “relief” by the Cubs staff, Anger began to rise once again in the Twiterverse. But the mighty Cub Tweeters were not giving up just yet. In the bottom half of the 9th, with one out, Cubs third baseman Ian Stewart tripled! Surprise quickly spiked and there was hope of a Cubs comeback. Sadly, the baseball demons that have haunted the hallows of Wrigley Field (The Billy Goat and Steve Bartman) reared their ugly heads once more when pinch runner Joe Mather was thrown out at home plate by Nationals third baseman, Ryan Zimmerman. This boneheaded move by Mather caused Anger to really hit its stride and only minutes later it spiked and surpassed Joy as the days dominant emotion as Marlon Byrd took a called third strike to end the game. The pent-up anger of the last century of losing was now alone on top of the charts as Tweeters came out of the wood work to voice their displeasures. At that moment, the intensity of the Anger peaked with a Kanjoya Score of 50. For background, a Kanjoya Score is a measurement of the intensity of emotion at any given time. A very high Kanjoya Score is considered to be at or above 70.
For a fan base that hasn’t seen a World Championship since before the Model T was invented, Anger can only last so long. Its self-preservation I suppose. Therefore it’s no surprise the conversation shifted within an hour or so after the game back to Joy, with hope for the steamy summer days and day so come in 2012.
What can we conclude from all of this? Cubs fans love their Cubbies, they are passionate, they get angry when the loose and they are experts at getting over it! We can also conclude that Kanjoya EI really can tell an amazing emotional story about an event, a brand campaign, your brand or almost any topic you can imagine.
Hopefully for all of you Cubs fans, we’ll be tracking the Cubs using Kanjoya EI during the 2012 World Series, where they will win that elusive trophy,and Joy will spike all the way off the graph! Go Cubs!
This is really great stuff! I bet a spike occurred in happiness during the commercial spot where Sony PS3 shows them winning the world series! It’s not far away for them as AAA help in on the way ;-0. Just wait until next year……..