Baseball-Reference.com
Type of site | Baseball |
---|---|
Owner | Sports Reference |
Created by | Sean Forman |
URL | www |
Launched | April 18, 2000[1] |
Current status | Active |
Baseball-Reference 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 is part of
History
Founder Sean Forman began developing the website while working on his Ph.D. dissertation in
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.[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.[5][6][7]
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]
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.[8]
Features
The site has season, career, and
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. It also offers sabermetrician Jay Jaffe's system acronymned "JAWS" 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's mustache,[7] which is the only "fictional" page on Baseball-Reference.[10] Another "Frivolity" was added in 2023, when the site made "Tungsten Arm O'Doyle", an internet meme associated with Shohei Ohtani, a redirect to Ohtani's page.[11]
Bullpen
Baseball-Reference has its own baseball encyclopedia, a wiki called "Baseball Reference Bullpen", which can be edited by anyone and is modeled after Wikipedia.[12] As of December 2023,[update] the Baseball Reference Bullpen contains over 109,100 articles.
References
- ^ "Baseball-Reference.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved August 2, 2016.
- ^ Sports Business Journal. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
- ^ Weinreb, Michael (October 28, 2015). "The Sublime Simplicity of Baseball-Reference.com". Rolling Stone. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
- ^ "Company Overview of Sports Reference, LLC". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on November 8, 2013. Retrieved November 8, 2013.
- ^ Weinreb, Michael (October 28, 2015). "The Sublime Simplicity of Baseball-Reference.com". Rolling Stone. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
- ^ "About Sports Reference". Sports Reference. Archived from the original on March 30, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
- ^ a b "Keith Hernandez Mustache", Baseball-Reference. Accessed June 8, 2015.
- ^ a b "Changing Player Identification Names from Player Nicknames to Given Names". sports-reference.com. April 30, 2021. Retrieved May 10, 2021.
- ^ "Main Page – BR Bullpen". Baseball-Reference. Sports Reference. Archived from the original on June 17, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
- ^ Perry, Dayn. "Keith Hernandez's mustache has its own Baseball-Reference page", CBS Sports website (Apr. 30, 2013).
- ^ Curtis, Charles (March 31, 2023). "Who's Tungsten Arm O'Doyle? The legendary Angels meme involving Shohei Ohtani, explained". For the Win. USA Today. Retrieved February 20, 2024.
- ^ "Main Page –BR Bullpen". Baseball-Reference. Sports Reference. Archived from the original on July 19, 2011. Retrieved July 17, 2011.