Type of site
|
Baseball |
---|---|
Owner | Sports Reference LLC |
Created by | Sean Forman |
Website | www |
Alexa rank | 4,383 (October 2014[update]) |
Launched | April 18, 2000 |
Current status | Active |
Baseball-Reference.com is a website providing baseball 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 sabermetrics in addition to traditional baseball "counting stats".
Baseball-Reference.com is part of Sports Reference, LLC; according to an article in Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal:
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.
Founder Sean Forman began developing the website while working on his Ph.D. dissertation in applied math and computational science at the University of Iowa. While writing his dissertation, he had also been writing articles on and blogging about sabermetrics. Forman's database was originally built from the Total Baseball series of baseball encyclopedias.
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.
In 2004, Forman founded Sports Reference. The company was incorporated as Sports Reference, LLC in 2007. In 2006, Forman left his job as a math professor at Saint Joseph's University in order to focus on Baseball-Reference full-time.
In February 2009, Fantasy Sports Ventures took a minority stake in Sports Reference, LLC, the parent company of Baseball-Reference, for a "low seven-figure sum".