SB Nation Reacts: Confidence isn’t dipping as you may expect

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join Reacts.

Welcome back to another edition of SB Nation Reacts. As we do every week, we start things out here with a look at the latest in Red Sox fans’ confidence polls before moving on to this week’s national topic. That is the Houston Astros, and how we’re feeling about them as they approach a playoff spot, not even two years removed from their sign-stealing scandal first blowing up. Let’s get into it.

Red Sox fans’ confidence poll

I’ll be honest. I was fully expecting to open this document and see the graph with an essentially vertical line indicating that confidence was crashing. Instead, there was actually a slight tick up. Granted, we are still at a point lower than what we’d seen since immediately following that opening weekend against the Orioles, but confidence jumped a bit from 55 percent to 58 percent. It does speak, I think, to the relative lack of expectations coming into the year. Say what you will about how you’re feeling about this run, and the team’s lack of activity at the deadline — I already have — but this team is still better than I expected them to be at this point in the year. So with that context, that confidence rating coming in above 50 percent makes some more sense.

Astros and MLB hatred

I guess I’m not really sure what the definition of “moved on” is. If it means whether or not I’m still thinking about it when I think about the Astros, and whether or not I still associate those who were on that team with the scandal? Well, I still do all of that. But it’s also not as though I’m thinking about it often in general. I don’t know. I guess I’d go no, but it feels like more of a spectrum than a binary.

This seems about right. The Yankees would almost always be at the top of this, but their being edged out by Houston I think answers that first question on its own. Even with a slight margin, it screams to me that people are not over it. I was a little surprised that the Dodgers were that much higher than the Red Sox, however. I prefer when the Red Sox are hated, though, so let’s get that number up.