CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WBOY) — The MLB has added a couple of new rules for the 2023 season to help give the game some much-needed excitement and a sense of urgency. Among these changes is the addition of a “pitch clock” which has some baseball fans steaming.

The pitch clock restricts the amount of time pitchers have to throw, similar to a shot clock in basketball. According to the MLB, the purpose of the new rule is part of an effort to “create a quicker pace of play.”

While some have embraced the rule as a way to keep the game more interesting, others have expressed their anger with the new rule on social media. According to geotagged Twitter data from betonline.ag, fans of the Washington Nationals and Pittsburgh Pirates fall in the top 10 fanbases who are most vocal about their contempt with the addition of a pitch clock, landing at #4 and #8 respectively.

The tweets that were used for this data included 170,000 tweets from various fanbases and then looked at which ones included phrases such as “I hate the pitch clock,” “I hate the new rules,” “the pitch clock sucks,” etc. The rankings for each team were then determined by the percentage of total tweets for a fanbase that included the above phrases.

Chicago is a city of extremes in this study with fans of the Chicago Cubs ranking the highest in this study with 12.96% of tweets complaining about the rules. Conversely, fans of the Chicago White Sox ranked the lowest in this study with only 2.03% of tweets complaining about the rules.

For more information on how tweets are tracked for studies like this, click here.