Did you ever wonder how often the word Mets appears in the history of books? Google has a new toy that lets you punch words in to see how often they appear.
To little surprise, the Mets didn’t start appearing until after 1960.
Here’s a different graph which shows 1960-2010.
What does it all mean? I have no idea except (a) the line goes up, (b) I killed 10 minutes at work and (c) we’re one post closer to Opening Day.
Click on the graphs for a bigger version.
Oh, and no I didn’t solve the code tweaking to get rid of the black-shirts ads.
That spike looks impressive until you start putting other teams near it:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Mets,Yankees,Cardinals,Phillies,Braves&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3