Sean Lahman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sean Lahman (born June 9, 1968) is a sports historian, writer, statistician, and archivist. Unlike most sports writers in the post-Bill James era, Lahman eschewed number crunching and statistical analysis to focus on collecting and publishing raw source material for sports researchers.
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[edit] Research & Database Construction
He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database [1] , a collection of baseball statistics for every team and player in Major League history. Starting in 1995, he made this database freely available for download from the Internet, helping to launch a new era of baseball research by making the raw data available to everyone. The database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Out of the Park Baseball, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history.
Lahman's efforts to document the statistical history of sports have gone beyond baseball. Since the late 1990s, he has edited or contributed to the definitive encyclopedias for baseball, professional football, professional basketball, and tennis. In the late 1990s, Lahman launched the Football Project, an effort to collect, digitize, and distribute play-by-play accounts from NFL games back to 1920.
[edit] Books
From 1998 to 2007, Lahman was an editor or contributor to more than a dozen sports encyclopedias [2] , including:
- three editions of Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball
- five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia
- two editions of the ESPN Football Encyclopedia
- Total Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia
- Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia
- Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia
In addition to these encyclopedias, Lahman has written several other books on sports history. He created the Pro Football Prospectus series in 2002 and produced the first three editions. His 2008 book The Pro Football Historical Abstract was called "the best football book of the decade" by members of the Pro Football Researchers Association. [3]
[edit] Other Writing
Lahman was senior editor for Total Sports Publishing from 1999 to 2001. He served as sports columnist for the New York Sun from 2001 until the paper's demise in 2008. [4] His work has appeared in publications like Wired, the New York Times, and Sport magazine and at popular websites such as ESPN.com and CBS Sportsline.com.
