The 2012 baseball season is quickly approaching, and Opening Day is right around the corner. Fans everywhere are abuzz across the social web. With preseason trades and roster selections there is plenty of chatter, yet some organizations are better engaged than others.

Off the bat, a sample of Facebook fans and Twitter followers established an intuitive fact that the NY Yankees and Boston Red Sox are the two most popular teams in baseball. Combined, they have won over 1/3 of World Series titles so it’s no surprise their reign influences the social media world. With a whopping 5.8MM Facebook fans for the Yankees, and 3.7MM Red Sox fans, they eclipse their nearest competitor, the Phillies by over 1.8MM.

For the same reason, the AL East is on the verge of 10 Million combined Facebook fans, significantly higher than any other Division as seen below.

** As of April 2012

World Series rings and trophies, however, do not correlate to social media engagement. For the 30 days leading up to the first pitch on April 4, using Facebook Graph API, I sampled the Fan Count per team as well as the ‘Talking About’ metric to measure each of the 30 teams’ social engagement rate. This presented insight into how some teams garner major league social media influence with their fan base. The social engagement index was calculated by measuring the 30-day trending average of fans per discussions, and thus the social media scorecard was compiled.

The National League accounts for 7 of the top 10 most socially engaged teams.  The Giants, Angels, and Dodgers, respectively are the top 3 most engaged teams in the 2012 pre-season, all three are also California based teams where social activity is higher than the national average. Three popular teams did not make the cut for social engagement, most surprising, the Red Sox fell to the bottom of the index. Unable to leverage their popularity, they average approximately 25% of the engagement rate of the #1 San Francisco Giants. This could be a result of fair weather fans, or their social fan base less engaged due to postseason woes in recent years.

The Detroit Tigers, the 10th most popular team by volume, had a positive shift to the 5th most socially engaged, and are most likely to be the next baseball team to reach the 1 Million fan mark this season. And while on the topic of standout stats, not charted, the Phillies have the highest Twitter following, surpassing the Yankees by over 100K.

The first official game of the 2012 season is technically Opening Night on April 4th, as the Cardinals take on the Miami Marlins with the opening of Florida’s new ballpark. This will be followed by six openers the next day April 5th. Marlins fans have a welcoming statistic on their side, as 5 of the last 6 ballpark christenings have been won by the home team.

Many exciting plays are sure to happen this year, so keep following your favorite team and I’ll keep an API on the scorecard!

The raw social scorecard data sorted by fans: