Network of Baseball Players’ Twitter Accounts

The offseason offers an opportunity to reflect on the pressing sabremeteric questions of the times: free agent value, fielding metrics, pitchf/x release points. All worthy and important pursuits. Here, though, I hope you will indulge me as I address something much more trivial: the network (or “graph,” as Zuck would say) of baseball players’ twitter accounts. You see, some baseball players tweet, and, not surprisingly, they follow other baseball players. But what does the network of these connections look like? Are teammates more likely to follow one another? Surely, but how much more likely? If player A follows player B, how likely is it that player B follows player A? And, more generally, how connected is the network — in other words how likely is it that any one player follows another? Here is a representation of that network. The nodes are twitter accounts and they are connected by directed links, the arrow going from the follower to the followed. The i...