Baseball-Reference.com

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Baseball-Reference
Baseball-Reference wordmark.jpg
Baseball-Reference screenshot.jpg
URL www.baseball-reference.com
Type of site Baseball
Owner Sports Reference LLC
Created by Sean Forman
Launched February 1, 2000
Current status Active

Baseball-Reference.com is a website providing statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics. It offers a variety of advanced baseball metrics[1] in addition to traditional baseball "counting stats".

Contents

History [edit]

The website came online in April 2000, after first being launched in February 2000 as part of the website for the Big Bad Baseball Annual. It was originally built as a web interface to the Lahman Baseball Database, though it now employs a variety of data sources. It has year-by-year team pages, a baseball encyclopedia (the Bullpen, powered by MediaWiki software, using the GFDL),[1] box scores and game logs from every MLB game back to 1919 and minor league player stats back to 1900. The Oracle of Baseball can link any two players by common teammates. The Oracle of Baseball is based on the Oracle of Bacon website.

Developer Sean Forman was a math professor at Saint Joseph's University before taking on this project full-time.[2]

In February 2009, Fantasy Sports Ventures took a minority stake in Sports Reference, the parent company of Baseball-Reference, for a "low seven-figure sum".[3] According to the article in Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal reporting this:

The Sports Reference sites combine to generate more than 1 million unique users per month, according to internal analytics. Company president and former college math professor Sean Forman has become something of a folk hero to baseball fans for the massive depth of data stretching to the 19th century and for the ease of navigation within Baseball-Reference.com.[3]

Bullpen [edit]

Baseball-reference.com has its own baseball encyclopedia, a wiki called "BR Bullpen", which can be edited by anyone and is modeled after Wikipedia.[4] As of July 17, 2011, it has 61,023 articles.

References [edit]

  1. ^ "Main Page – BR Bullpen". Baseball-Reference.com. Sports Reference. Archived from the original on June 17, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2011. 
  2. ^ "About Sports Reference". Sports Reference. Archived from the original on March 30, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2011. 
  3. ^ a b Fisher, Eric (February 16, 2009). "FSV buys stake in reference sites". Sports Business Journal. Retrieved July 16, 2011. 
  4. ^ "Main Page –BR Bullpen". Baseball-Reference.com. Sports Reference. Archived from the original on 19 July 2011. Retrieved July 17, 2011. 

External links [edit]