Dr. Fauci Takes The Mound For Opening Day For The Nationals

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

Many things (to put it mildly) have changed for the Washington Nationals since the team became the 2019 World Series Champions in October. Arguably the most surprising development, however, may be that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci will be throwing out the first pitch of the 2020 season.

As context, it is much more common for presidents rather than government doctors to throw out the first pitches on Opening Day. And while Dr. Fauci clearly is famous now and had a very successful career prior to the recent COVID-19 outbreak (particularly with his work on HIV), he was largely unknown particularly to sports fans until this year.

Yet, Dr. Fauci has become well-known enough that he will take the mound on Opening Day to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the Nationals. How well-known is he? On July 20th (the day the announcement was made), there were over 86.9 thousand Twitter posts featuring the combined terms “Fauci” and “Nationals.”

However, Dr. Fauci is not without his critics including the current President and many members of his administration. Is it a “homerun” (terrible pun intended) that Dr. Fauci would be a good selection by the Nationals for the first pitch to engage with their fans?

We used our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) and Social Sentiment Analysis Platform (SAP) to examine if this was the case, using machine learning and data-driven analysis. Typically, we use AIP to analyze the organic posts of followers from specific accounts to determine their demographic profiles (what people say enables us to statistically infer who they are with a high degree of confidence). 

Since Dr. Fauci does not have his own Twitter account, we applied AIP to NIAID’s account and compared it to the Nationals account. The table below shows strong overlap between these accounts on multiple different demographic attributes particularly from an income and education perspective.

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In addition, we completed an analysis of 7,697 Twitter posts featuring “Fauci” and “Nationals” to determine the sentiment of fans, media, and sponsors on the team’s decision. One of the benefits of using SAP in this context is that B6A’s research demonstrates that SAP scores have a strong and statistically significant correlation with revenue growth.

More specifically, an increase in sentiment scores means that there is an increase in the probability of revenue growth. We typically find that teams generate an average range of sentiment scores in the 10-20% range and Fauci-related Nationals conversation is at the upper edge of that range as seen below. 

  • Fauci And Nationals (7/20/20)

  • Posts: 7,697 (with retweets filtered out)

  • Impressions: 18,406,244

  • Average Sentiment: 19.86%

Fauci, however, is not a perfect fit for the Nationals. Our analysis showed that the NIAID account disproportionately is composed of older demographics while the Nationals account is not. 

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In addition, the highest value post in our analysis also had one of the highest negative sentiment scores.

Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11

Dr. Fauci throwing out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals game while telling college athletes they shouldn't play sports is peak DC hypocrisy and is disgustingly elitist.

Dr. Fauci, however, does demonstrate the value to teams of examining non-endemic influencers as way to reach fans particularly in the current environment. AIP and SAP can help sports properties and partners identify which influencers are the best fit to target a team’s fans.