Baseball’s Kings of Twitter

Many Major League Baseball players are on Twitter. The MLB Twitter account even maintains what looks to be a fairly exhaustive list: https://twitter.com/MLB/players/members. It’s the off-season so I needed something baseball related to occupy myself with until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training, so I went searching for Baseball’s Kings of Twitter. I would expect to find superstars, MVPs, and aces; particularly from big markets like New York and Los Angeles. Maybe some veterans who’ve been on Twitter for years, or some recent post-season heroes that received extra exposure. Here are the top 19 (I cut it off at 1/4M followers) players in order of Twitter followers:

Player	Handle	Followers	Team
Nick Swisher	@nickswisher	1,683,346	Indians
Yu Darvish	@faridyu	1,000,273	Rangers
Brandon Phillips	@datdudebp	726,775	Reds
Brian Wilson	@brianwilson38	641,617	Free Agent
David Ortiz	@davidortiz	552,222	Red Sox
Robinson Cano	@robinsoncano	435,580	Free Agent
Jose Bautista	@joeybats19	430,313	Blue Jays
Justin Verlander	@justinverlander	423,241	Tigers
Mike Trout	@trouty20	377,378	Angels
CC Sabathia	@cc_sabathia	365,252	Yankees
Bryce Harper	@bharper3407	354,929	Nationals
Matt Kemp	@therealmattkemp	353,367	Dodgers
Miguel Cabrera	@miguelcabrera	329,657	Tigers
Curtis Granderson	@cgrand14	293,612	Free Agent
Jacoby Ellsbury	@jacobyellsbury	267,295	Free Agent
Mark Teixeira	@teixeiramark25	255,881	Yankees
Josh Hamilton	@thejoshhamilton	252,639	Angels
Shane Victorino	@shanevictorino	252,070	Red Sox

The big market advantage holds as most of these guys have recently played for a top 10 market team. Brandon Phillips, Jose Bautista, Bryce Harper, and Miguel Cabrera are the exceptions there. All of these players have made an All Star team, although there are a few that might not make it if there was voting today. The 2013 American League MVP Miguel Cabrera is on there, but the National League MVP Andrew McCutchen didn’t make the list. The 2013 Cy Young Award winners Clayton Kershaw (What up Cuz?) and Max Sherzer are missing as well. The 2013 World Series Champion Red Sox are well represented with three players from that team (Ortiz, Ellsbury, Victorino), but the National League Champion Cardinals have no one. There are no rookies but there are a few youngsters with Trout and Harper. 2013 was Darvish’s 2nd year in the MLB, but I’m guessing some of his followers are familiar with him from his time playing in Japan.

While the majority of the list are sluggers, starting pitchers are represented with Verlander, Darvish, and Sabathia. Brian Wilson is the lone reliever. He was very popular in San Francisco and is always looking for attention with his oddball antics. Miguel Cabrera’s posts are multilingual but Yu Darvish’s are entirely Japanese and Google Translate isn’t much help.