Best fans in baseball? Brewers fans rank 4th in study

If you ever need proof that Milwaukee is a fantastic baseball town, here it is: According to ticketcity.com, the Brewers have the fourth-best fanbase in Major League Baseball.

Over at ESPN, Jason Stark took a look at this ranking and had the following to say about the Brewers:

BREWERS AT NO. 4? No argument from me on this one, believe it or not. Only four teams ranked above the Brewers in weighted Twitter following. And considering this is the smallest media market in baseball, it never ceases to impress me how rabid this fan base is.

Apparently the study uses average attendance from 2014, average ticket price on secondary markets from 2014, annual team value via Forbes, twitter followers as percentage of metro population, and Facebook likes as percentage of metro population. You can find a breakdown of the raw data here.

Not going to lie, though: The Brewers definitely were helped a bit by this being from 2014. Last year, the Brewers were 8th in average attendance which is likely in part due to them having an excellent April and being in first place for much of the year. This year, they've dropped to 11th on average -- still good, but as the team suffers that number will probably not remain quite at the level it has been in recent years.

Regardless, for a franchise that has never won a World Series and had to suffer through the 1990s and 2000s, I think it's a well-deserved nod to be in the top-5 fanbases.

In fact, kudos to the entire NL Central -- four of the five teams from the division are in the top-8 of 'Best Fanbases' in this study. The only outlier is, somewhat surprisingly, the Cubs: Chicago fell to 14th of the 30 teams. Of course, Chicago is the only team in the division that has to battle with another team for fans in the same city.

So take that, rest-of-the-MLB. Best divisional fans in baseball.