I’m always interested in searching habits of people browsing the web so I found this little tool interesting. And if I can make it pertain to baseball, all the better.
The graph above shows the number of hits that Andre Dawson’s page on Wikipedia took. The results aren’t too surprising though I’m surprised that the spike was so dramatic. Essentially on the day of the announcement and the day after. Not so much before the fact. I attribute it to idea that hard core baseball fans (the ones that would be researching Dawson beforehand) aren’t so likely to use a source like Wikipedia for their research.
For the occasional baseball fan, Wikipedia might be their first stop.
For kicks, here is the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Wikipedia page spike graph. Pretty much the same but less of a spike. Obviously, the Hall of Fame was more on people’s mind as opposed to a particular player (since no one was announced yet).