If you’re looking for a clean read on who America is pulling for in October, the Brewers came out way ahead in this one.
Using geotagged posts and hashtag tracking on X.com - still widely known as Twitter - the sports-betting website thesportsinsider.com found that fans in 34 of the 50 states were backing Milwaukee in the National League Championship Series. The Dodgers, despite entering the NLCS as the favorite and being the top pick to win this year’s World Series since the final out of the 2025 Fall Classic, were only the choice in three states: California, Nevada and Hawaii.
That split says plenty about the matchup itself. Milwaukee is the team of the people in this exercise, at least according to the data, while Los Angeles carries the burden of being the giant.
The Brewers’ opponent comes with the two-time defending World Series champion label and a payroll machine to match. In fact, the source notes that all the payrolls of the Brewers and the two American League Championship Series teams are each smaller than the Dodgers’ competitive-balance tax penalties alone, which are listed at $183 million.
The Brewers’ support stretched far beyond Wisconsin. The state-by-state breakdown showed them taking most of the Midwest and a good chunk of the West, plus Alaska, several Northeastern states including New York and Massachusetts, and even a number of Southern states, with Georgia and Alabama among them.
The AL Championship Series followed a similar underdog-versus-crowd-favorite split. The Tampa Bay Rays drew only Florida, while the Cleveland Guardians picked up 12 states, including many around Ohio and into the Mid-Atlantic.
The hashtags tracked by Sports Insider included Milwaukee’s #ThisIsMyCrew, the Dodgers’ #ITFDB and #LetsGoDodgers, Tampa Bay’s #ForTampaBay and Cleveland’s #GuardsBall. The site also counted phrases like “I'm rooting for the Brewers.” The tracking window began Saturday, when the ALCS matchup was set, and ran through just before first pitch of Monday’s Game 2.
There’s one more wrinkle here: bots. The source cites Bitdefender and notes that X’s owner said Twitter suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 for breaching spam and manipulation rules, while other estimates place the share of bot accounts somewhere between 9% and 15%.
So yes, the Brewers’ nationwide edge comes with a grain of salt. There was no data on how many of those bots were backing Milwaukee - or Los Angeles - and, as the article puts it, would they tell you the truth anyway?
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Pat Murphys fingerprints were all over it, from the lineup choices to how the pitching was managed once the game tightened. With the Dodgers now chasing from behind, the Brewers can point to a performance that looked equal parts execution and planning, and theyre carrying a real sense that their manager has pushed the right buttons at the right time. [Read more 🡒]