| 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.
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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] In reporting this transaction, journalist Eric Fisher wrote:
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]
Baseball-reference.com has its own baseball 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.