Baseball Reference is a

baseball statistics Baseball statistics include a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the sport of baseball. Because the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and player activity is characteristically distinguishable ind ...

database maintained by

Sports Reference Sports Reference, LLC is an American sports statistics company that operates databases of several sports. They include Pro Football Reference for American football, Baseball Reference for baseball, Basketball Reference for basketball, Hockey ...

. The site provides career statistics for

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball league composed of 30 teams, divided equally between the National League (baseball), National League (NL) and the American League (AL), with 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. MLB i ...

(MLB) players and teams as well as records, MLB draft history, and

sabermetrics Sabermetrics (originally SABRmetrics) is the original or blanket term for sports analytics in the US, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity ...

History

Founder Sean Forman began developing the website while working on his Ph.D. dissertation in

applied math Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathematical sc ...

and

computational science Computational science, also known as scientific computing, technical computing or scientific computation (SC), is a division of science, and more specifically the Computer Sciences, which uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and s ...

at the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (U of I, UIowa, or Iowa) is a public university, 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 int ...

. 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 ''Total Baseball'' is a 2,301-page baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. By its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career sta ...

'' series of baseball

encyclopedia An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into article (publishing), articles or entries that are arranged Alp ...

s. 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 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 Saint Joseph's University (SJU or St. Joe's) is a Private university, private Jesuits, Jesuit university in Philadelphia, Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The university was founded by the Jesuits, Society of J ...

to focus on Baseball Reference full-time. In February 2009, Fantasy Sports Ventures took a minority stake in Sports 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

Statistics

The site has season, career, and

minor league Minor leagues are professional sports leagues which are not regarded as the premier leagues in those sports. Minor league teams tend to play in smaller, less elaborate venues, often competing in smaller cities/markets. This term is used in Nort ...

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 The Cy Young Award is given annually to the best pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB), one each for the American League (AL) and National League (baseball), National League (NL). The award was introduced in 1956 by Commissioner of Baseball ( ...

and

MVP MVP most commonly refers to: * Most valuable player, an award, typically for the best performing player in a sport or competition * Minimum viable product, a concept for feature estimating used in business and engineering MVP may also refer to: ...

, 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 The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relativel ...

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 offers "Black Ink" and "Gray Ink" tests, which tally a player's dominance and overall productivity against his peers. In 2012, it began to offer Jay Jaffe's Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score (JAWS) statistic for comparing players of different eras against each other by weighing their performance in the prime as well as their entire career. Baseball Reference began including its version of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2010. Its version determining a player's value differs slightly from other baseball statistics websites, including FanGraphs and

Baseball Prospectus Baseball Prospectus (BP) is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team perf ...

Bullpen

Baseball Reference has its own baseball encyclopedia, a

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

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

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

. the Baseball Reference Bullpen contains more than 119,000 articles.

Easter eggs and other humor

There are a number of what the website calls "Frivolities." Examples include: * The Oracle of Baseball, which is no longer active on the website, linked any two players by common teammates in the way the pop culture website " Oracle of Bacon" does. * A page devoted to

Keith Hernandez Keith Hernandez (born October 20, 1953) is an American former professional baseball first baseman. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Mets, and Cleveland Indians. Hernandez was a five-time Major League ...

's mustache, which is the only "fictional" page on Baseball Reference. * The site made " Tungsten Arm O'Doyle", an internet meme associated with

Shohei Ohtani is a Japanese professional baseball designated hitter and pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers of Major League Baseball (MLB). Nicknamed "Shotime", he has previously played in MLB for the Los Angeles Angels and in Nippon Professional Basebal ...

, a redirect to Ohtani's page. * Although the standard player page notes a given player's favored batting and throwing arms, Paul O'Neill's page adds his kicking leg and a link to a video of the 1989 game when he kicked the ball from the outfield to first base. * The 2021 Seattle Mariners page lists the team's "fun differential" of +90, based on a comment from manager Scott Servais on the team's negative run differential.

References

External links

* {{Official website Baseball websites Works about baseball statistics Internet properties established in 2000 Sports databases