Twitter fan reactions about the Alex Cora re-hiring

Being a huge fan of baseball, and my favorite team being the Boston Red Sox I thought it would be interesting to do a Twitter sentiment analysis on the team. Sentiment analysis is the process of interpreting words and classifying them as positive or negative. This is done through a form of data mining. In this project, I used the statistical programming language R to conduct my analysis. Using the “rtweet” package, I extracted over 1,000 recent tweets about the Red Sox to gauge how Twitter users feel about the team. Although the baseball season is currently in its off-season, I was curious about recent fan reactions on Twitter to some notable events related to the team.

Earlier this month, the Boston Red Sox re-hired manager Alex Cora. In 2017, the Houston Astros won the World Series while Cora was their bench coach. Earlier this year, the MLB revealed that in 2017, the Astros were guilty of an illegal sign stealing scandal throughout that entire season. They used a camera in the outfield that recorded the oppositions’ catchers’ signs. They would relay the signs to the batter through sound cues like banging on trash cans. It was revealed that Cora was one of the coaches guilty of this cheating. Cora became manager of the Boston Red Sox the following season, but he and the team mutually agreed to part ways after the league completed the investigation. Cora received a one-year suspension from baseball as punishment through the 2020 postseason. The league went on to investigate if Cora brought the same mechanisms to the Red Sox who won the World Series in 2018. However, after a full investigation it was later revealed that Cora did not bring the same sign stealing mechanisms to Boston. A few weeks ago, Cora got re-hired by the Boston Red Sox to manage their team for the 2021 season. He was a very popular manager, who was well-liked by the players and fans. Due to this I was curious to see what the reactions to Cora’s re-hiring were like.

In this analysis, I also used R to analyze the tweets from the official Boston Red Sox Twitter account. Attached here is a screenshot of the official Twitter account. The Boston Red Sox are the fifth most followed Major League Baseball team on Twitter and are the third most valued team in baseball according to Forbes. Established in 1901, the Red Sox are one of the most popular and most talked about teams in baseball. Known for their rabid fan base, “Red Sox Nation” is extremely passionate about their team and the fans are known to be vocal with their opinions.

After conducting my sentiment analysis, I used Tableu, a visualization tool, to understand the tweet patterns and overall sentiment of my findings. It is also important to note in sentiment analysis that we are taking the words out of context. There could be humor or sarcasm involved so we can only make our best assumptions and suggestions from the data.

First, I extracted 1,000 tweets from the Boston Red Sox twitter account and took 1,000 tweets containing the words “Boston Red Sox.” I did this using the “get_timeline” function which extracts tweets from a certain user and the “search_tweets” function which extracts tweets on a given subject. I then combined the two data sets to plot a frequency graph in R to see how often the Red Sox are tweeting and how often they are being tweeted about. Below is a screenshot of the graph I conducted. The R code for this graph can be found at the end of the blog titled “Code 1.”

This graph shows that there was a consistent flow of tweets from the beginning of August until the end of September. This makes sense as the 2020 Red Sox season was still going on during this time as their season did not end until September 27, 2020. Looking at the graph, there were not a lot of tweets from October to November most likely because this time is the beginning of their off-season. They were not allowed to make any roster moves until the end of this season’s Word Series, which finished on October 27, 2020. However, we see an immediate spike in Twitter activity in the month of November. On Friday, November 6, 2020, the Red Sox announced that they re-hired Alex Cora as their manager. And then later that week, on Tuesday, November 10, a press conference was held by the Red Sox’s front office and Cora as they answered questions from the media. This was Cora’s first media appearance where he addressed questions about what occurred in Houston. This event would explain the huge spike in tweets in the month of November. It also explains why in the month of November, the Red Sox official Twitter account received its most engagements on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday demonstrated in the graph below. Tuesday and Wednesday from the press conference, and Friday from the re-hiring announcement.

Taking this analysis a step further, I was curious to see what people were saying about Cora’s re-hiring. Using the “search_tweets” function again, I extracted 1,000 tweets that had “Alex Cora” in them. It is important to note that the “search_tweet” only takes tweets from the past few weeks. Once the dataset was extracted, I used the “syuzhet” package in R, to run two different sentiment analysis to try and determine the overall emotion on Twitter behind Cora’s re-hiring. Each tweet is scored with an overall sentiment value. I graphed the scores for “sentiment 1” in a histogram below. The y-axis represents the number of tweets and the x-axis represents the sentiment score. The code for this analysis can be found at the end of the blog labeled “Code 2.”

This graph appears to have a median score around zero. I wanted to explore this further, so I imported my dataset into Tableu to further create some visuals on this sentiment analysis. I created a “Packed Bubble” graph to show relational value. My findings can be found below.

This graph above shows the majority of the tweets had a sentiment score of zero, representing a neutral connotation. Zero appears most often. The remainder of the tweets have a fairly equal balance between positive and negative sentiment scores. I would assume most of the positive tweets came from Red Sox fans who were happy about Cora’s return as manager. As stated earlier, Cora is well-respected in Boston. He won a World Series with the team as a player back in 2007, and again as a manager in 2018. Referring to the Tableu bar chart on the Red Sox Twitter retweet count by weekday, we can see below that Friday being the highest, most likely was a result of Cora’s re-hiring. After graphing the Cora data, we can see that Friday resulted in the highest sentiment score as well.

Some of the negative tweets most likely came from baseball fans who were not happy that Cora was brought back into the game so soon. Some of these fans may have believed that Cora should have served a longer suspension or possibly have been banned from the league for good.

Next, I created a word cloud in R with this dataset to see if there were any trends or patterns within the text. A word cloud is used to see which words are most associated with a given topic. The bigger the word, the more mentioned they are in given tweets. In order to create a word cloud in R, one must download the “word cloud” package first. I used the “stop_words” function in R to exclude “Alex Cora” from the cloud because he is the topic being analyzed and including his name would skew our cloud. The code can be found at the end of the blog titled “Code 3.”

It is clear most of the tweets about Cora involve the Red Sox as demonstrated by the word cloud above. Recently, the Red Sox hired a new bench coach named Will Venable with the return of Cora. That explains words like “coach” “bench” and “venable.” We also see some words that involve Cora’s scandal in Houston such as “cheated”, “Astros”, “whistleblower”, and “stealing.” Overall, this word cloud summarizes most of the recent topics revolving around Alex Cora.

Overall, I was able to gather this data through Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) which is a platform that lets users retrieve and analyze data from Twitter. I gathered thousands of tweets on the Red Sox and Alex Cora in R where I was able to search for trends within the data. Sentiment analysis and graphing packages in R allowed me to gather more information about the tweets. As I analyzed and created my own datasets in R, I exported the data into Tableu where I built interactive data visualizations. Based on my research using these methods, I was able to find that there was an overall neutral connotation from baseball fans on the re-hiring of Alex Cora. His re-hiring this past month allowed for the official Red Sox account to reach their most Twitter engagements this offseason. This being the case, the Red Sox Twitter could continue to post content of Cora this off-season to show how he is preparing the team for the 2021 season. This would allow for a continued trend of high Twitter engagements during the off-season.

Code 1

Code 2

Code 3