Playground →
Two Pittsburgh sports franchises sit at the top of Andrew McCutchen's neighbor set — and they pull well ahead of everything else. The Pittsburgh Penguins score 0.96 and the Pittsburgh Pirates score 0.95, a paired spike that defines the two-peak structure: one cluster anchored in Pittsburgh civic sports fandom, a second cluster of individual athletes fanning out below them.
That second cluster is dense with fellow athletes. James Harrison (0.85), Troy Polamalu (0.85), Ben Roethlisberger (0.85), JuJu Smith-Schuster (0.85), Joe Thomas (0.84), and Ryan Shazier (0.84) all land within a tight band — and nearly all are associated with Pittsburgh or Cleveland-area football. The Cleveland Indians (0.85) extend the regional sports footprint into baseball. Of the top 10 neighbors, seven carry the Athletes subcategory and two are Sports Teams; the lone exception is McNeil (0.85, Miscellaneous). No non-sports entity appears in the top 10 at all.
The shape here is a Pittsburgh-and-region sports audience that follows franchises and players as a single coherent bloc — hockey, baseball, and football athletes drawing from the same pool of followers, with McCutchen sitting squarely inside that regional sports identity rather than apart from it.
