Sean Lahman
Sean Lahman (born June 9, 1968) is an award-winning author and journalist.[1]
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[edit] Sports Research
He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database ,[2] 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. In addition to fostering research, the Lahman Database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Baseball Mogul and Out of the Park Baseball, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history.
In the mid 1990s, Lahman created the first online baseball encyclopedia at his Baseball Archive website. He later sold the website to Total Sports and became senior editor for that company's print publishing division. The encyclopedia disappeared from the web when Total Sports declared bankruptcy. It was later reborn as Baseball-Reference.com, and Lahman resurrected the Baseball Archive website as a platform to continue the free distribution of his database.
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 ,[3] 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 Pro 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 annual Pro Football Prospectus in 2002 and produced the first three editions in the series. 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. .[4] It also won the 2008 Nelson Ross Award, presented annually for "outstanding achievement in pro football research and historiography."
[edit] Other Writing
Lahman was senior editor for Total Sports Publishing from 1999 to 2001. He later served as a sports reporter for the New York Sun from 2003 until the paper's demise in 2008. [5] His work has also appeared in publications like Wired, the New York Times, and Sport magazine and at popular websites such as ESPN.com and CBS Sportsline.com. During the 1990s, he also wrote two computer-related books: Relational Databases and Building Data-Driven Web Sites.
He currently is a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle[6] and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open source databases.[7][8]
[edit] External links
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[edit] References
- ^ News MVP winners reflect efforts to expand digital content, http://www.gannett.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/99999999/NEWSWATCH07/110407001, retrieved 2011-05-08
- ^ Lahman Baseball Database download page, http://baseball1.com/content/category/6/36/82/, retrieved 2008-10-05
- ^ List of Sean Lahman's Books, http://seanlahman.com/books/booklist.html, retrieved 2008-10-05
- ^ Pro Football Researchers Association, http://www.pfraforum.org/index.php?showtopic=399, retrieved 2008-10-05
- ^ New York Sun archive, http://www.nysun.com/authors/Sean+Lahman, retrieved 2008-10-05
- ^ Democrat and Chronicle, http://blogs.democratandchronicle.com/watchdog/, retrieved 2010-06-22
- ^ New York State Associated Press Association 2011 workshop
- ^ Social Media and Communications Symposium, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2010
