Baseball-Reference.com
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| Web address | www |
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Type of site
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Baseball |
| Owner | Sports Reference LLC |
| Created by | Sean Forman |
| Launched | February 1, 2000 |
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Alexa rank
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 4,383 (October 2014[update])[1] |
| 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:
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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.[2]
History
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.[3]
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.[4] In 2006, Forman left his job as a math professor at Saint Joseph's University in order to focus on Baseball-Reference full-time.[3][5]
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".[2]
Features
It has year-by-year team pages, a baseball encyclopedia (the Bullpen, powered by MediaWiki software, using the GFDL),[6] box scores and game logs from every MLB game back to 1914 and minor league player stats as far back as 1888.
In addition, there are a number of what the website calls "Frivolities", e.g., The Oracle of Baseball, which links any two players by common teammates in the way the pop culture favorite "Oracle of Bacon" website does. Another one of their Frivolities is the page devoted to Keith Hernandez's mustache,[7] which is the only "fictional" page on B-R.com.[8]
Bullpen
Baseball-Reference.com has its own baseball encyclopedia, a wiki called "Baseball Reference Bullpen", which can be edited by anyone and is modeled after Wikipedia.[9] As of July 2015, the Baseball Reference Bullpen contains over 77,200 articles.
References
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- ↑ "Keith Hernandez Mustache," Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed June 8, 2015.
- ↑ Perry, Dayn. "Keith Hernandez's mustache has its own Baseball-Reference page," CBS Sports website (Apr. 30, 2013).
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External links
- No URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.
