Here in Nashville, we’re starting to get occasional warm days (and even more occasional dry days), and spring training baseball has arrived with the warmer weather. Our local AAA team, the Nashville Sounds, has a beautiful stadium right next to downtown, and we can’t wait for the season to start.

In honor of the boys of summer, this blog post looks at the key term in team names, and how popular they are as marks not for pro baseball teams. The research looked at singular and plural forms, which probably overcounted Reds and Nationals a bit, but at least this permitted consistent methodology. The Google Books N-gram research doesn’t try to exclude baseball content in the same way, so marks like RED SOX aren’t screen for non-baseball use in the same way.

Twins, Angels, and Nationals were much more common than the median in both lists, with Rays, Athletics, Tigers, Rangers, Pirates, Reds, and Giants substantially above the median on both lists, too. The terms that had the least salience in more general brand use and Google N-gram book usage were Orioles, the two colored Sox, Astros, and Diamondbacks, with Phillies, Marlins, Dodgers, Padres, and Rockies all lower than the median on both, but less dramatically so.

Braves and Brewers were a good bit more common on the brand side than n-grams, and Cubs and Cardinals were the only terms that were noticeably more common from an n-gram perspective (versus the median) than as brands.

The raw data: