Baseball-Reference is a website providing

baseball statistics Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a player or team. Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itsel ...

for every player in

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

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 Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...

in addition to traditional baseball "counting stats". Baseball-Reference is part of Sports Reference, LLC; according to an article in

Street & Smith Street & Smith or Street & Smith Publications, Inc. was a New York City publisher specializing in inexpensive paperbacks and magazines referred to as dime novels and pulp fiction. They also published comic books and sporting yearbooks. Among t ...

's ''Sports Business Journal'', the company's sites have more than one million unique users per month.

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 The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 col ...

. 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 went 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. Sports Reference is a website that came out of the Baseball Reference website. 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". At the end of April 2021, the site changed a number of identifying names, "discontinuing the use of nicknames that are racially or ethnically influenced" and "names based upon a player's disability", such as Chief Bender and Dummy Hoy, who are now listed as Charles Bender and Billy Hoy, respectively.

Features

The site has season, career, and minor league records (when available, back to ) for everyone who has played Major League Baseball, year-by-year team pages, all final league standings, all postseason numbers, voting results for all historic awards such as the Cy Young Award and

MVP In team sports, a most valuable player award, abbreviated 'MVP award', is an honor typically bestowed upon an individual (or individuals, in the instance of a tie) whose individual performance is the greatest in an entire league, for a particu ...

, head-to-head batter vs. pitcher career totals, individual statistical leaders for each season and all-time, managers' career records, the full results of all MLB player drafts, Negro leagues statistics (Baseball Reference added Negro League Statistics to its website in 2021), a baseball encyclopedia (the Bullpen), and box scores and game logs from every MLB game back to , among other features. To compare ballplayers to one-another it offer
"Black ink"
an
"Gray Ink"
Tests, which tally a player's dominance and overall productivity against his peers. It also offers sabremetrician

Jay Jaffe A jay is a member of a number of species of medium-sized, usually colorful and noisy, passerine birds in the Crow family, Corvidae. The evolutionary relationships between the jays and the magpies are rather complex. For example, the Eurasian m ...

's acronymne
"JAWS"
system for ranking players of different eras against each other by weighting their primes. 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 Keith Hernandez (born October 20, 1953) is an American former Major League Baseball first baseman who played the majority of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets. Hernandez was a five-time All-Star who shared the 1979 NL MVP ...

's mustache,"Keith Hernandez Mustache"
Baseball-Reference. Accessed June 8, 2015. which is the only "fictional" page on Baseball-Reference.

Bullpen

Baseball-Reference has its own baseball encyclopedia, a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

called "Baseball Reference Bullpen", which can be edited by anyone and is modeled after

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

. As of July 2015, the Baseball Reference Bullpen contains over 77,200 articles.

References

External links

* {{Official website Major League Baseball websites Baseball websites Baseball statistics Fantasy sports Internet properties established in 2000