Baseball-Reference
 | |
Type of site | Baseball |
|---|---|
| Owner | Sports Reference |
| Created by | Sean Forman |
| URL | www |
| Launched | April 18, 2000[1] |
| Current status | Active |
Baseball-Referenceis a website providingbaseball statisticsfor every player inMajor League Baseballhistory. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics. It offers a variety of advanced baseballsabermetricsin addition to traditional baseball "counting stats".
Baseball-Reference is part ofSports Reference, LLC;according to an article inStreet & Smith'sSports Business Journal,the company's sites have more than one million unique users per month.[2]
History[edit]
Founder Sean Forman began developing the website while working on his Ph.D. dissertation inapplied mathandcomputational scienceat theUniversity of Iowa.While writing his dissertation, he had also been writing articles on and blogging about sabermetrics. Forman's database was originally built from theTotal Baseballseries of baseballencyclopedias.[3]
The website went online in April 2000, after first being launched in February 2000 as part of the website for theBig Bad Baseball Annual.It was originally built as a web interface to theLahman Baseball Database,though it now employs a variety of data sources.
In 2004, Forman foundedSports Reference.Sports Reference is a website that came out of the Baseball Reference website. The company wasincorporatedas Sports Reference, LLC in 2007.[4]In 2006, Forman left his job as a math professor atSaint Joseph's Universityin 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 asChief BenderandDummy Hoy,who are now listed as Charles Bender and Billy Hoy, respectively.[8]
Features[edit]
The site has season, career, andminor leaguerecords (when available, back to1888) 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 theCy Young AwardandMVP,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 leaguesstatistics (Baseball Reference added Negro League Statistics to its website in 2021), a baseball encyclopedia (the Bullpen),[9]and box scores and game logs from every MLB game back to1901,among other features.[8]
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 offerssabermetricianJay 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 toKeith 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 withShohei Ohtani,a redirect to Ohtani's page.[11]
Bullpen[edit]
Baseball-Reference has its own baseball encyclopedia, awikicalled "Baseball Reference Bullpen", which can be edited by anyone and is modeled afterWikipedia.[12]As of December 2023,[update]the Baseball Reference Bullpen contains over 109,100 articles.
References[edit]
- ^"Baseball-Reference WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools".WHOIS.RetrievedAugust 2,2016.
- ^abFisher, Eric (February 16, 2009)."FSV buys stake in reference sites".Sports Business Journal.RetrievedJuly 16,2011.
- ^Weinreb, Michael (October 28, 2015)."The Sublime Simplicity of Baseball-Reference".Rolling Stone.RetrievedOctober 28,2015.
- ^"Company Overview of Sports Reference, LLC".Bloomberg Businessweek.Archived fromthe originalon November 8, 2013.RetrievedNovember 8,2013.
- ^Weinreb, Michael (October 28, 2015)."The Sublime Simplicity of Baseball-Reference".Rolling Stone.RetrievedOctober 28,2015.
- ^"About Sports Reference".Sports Reference. Archived fromthe originalon March 30, 2009.RetrievedJuly 16,2011.
- ^ab"Keith Hernandez Mustache",Baseball-Reference. Accessed June 8, 2015.
- ^ab"Changing Player Identification Names from Player Nicknames to Given Names".sports-reference.April 30, 2021.RetrievedMay 10,2021.
- ^"Main Page – BR Bullpen".Baseball-Reference.Sports Reference. Archived fromthe originalon June 17, 2009.RetrievedJuly 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.RetrievedFebruary 20,2024.
- ^"Main Page –BR Bullpen".Baseball-Reference.Sports Reference. Archived fromthe originalon July 19, 2011.RetrievedJuly 17,2011.
