What is the state of your favorite Major League Baseball franchise? How hot, or not, is it? How can you even go about putting a number on such a thing?
The sentiment a fan of any team has from year to year will be heavily influenced by not just the results of the most recently completed season, but also how that season fits into the context of the past several years. Emotion-fueled attitudes don't change overnight.
If you root for a team that has been going well, then a down season might not turn you sour on it right away. You might grow a little concerned about things falling apart, but for now, the longer track record of success gives you hope the bad season was just a blip. This is probably an apt description of Cardinals fans right now, whose reliably solid team sunk to last place in 2023.
On the other end of the scale, if your team has gone a number of years without sniffing .500, one season in the 81-to-85-win range isn't going to eliminate skepticism. This is where Marlins fans are now.
But if that 80-something-win season of improvement is followed by a true breakout, all of a sudden things seem merry and bright. This is where Orioles fans are after their team ended an epic string of losing in 2022 by sneaking over .500, then followed that up with triple-digit wins in 2023.
This is the dynamic we seek to capture for every team today, by assigning each franchise a temperature, measured in Fahrenheit degrees, which takes a literal view of the concepts of the hotness or coldness of a franchise. Is your team close to boiling over? Is it suspended in a deep freeze? Or is it stuck somewhere in the comfortable, but unexciting, middle?
We've ranked all 30 MLB teams by this new number -- which we're calling franchise temperature -- as we head into 2024.