Core Purpose for Sports-Reference.com
Answer questions as quickly, easily, and accurately as possible.
Collaborators & Sources
Just a note that much the following was written in 2004, so some of it is out of date, but I think it's worth keeping it around, so I did.
Sean Forman, Feb 19, 2017
If you enjoy this site, it is only due to a great amount of work bya large number of people.
Jim Furtado hashelped in a myriad of ways, server support, advice, humor and weworked together on Baseball Primer which he has taken over andrenamed The BaseballThink Factory.
Sean Lahman laid thegroundwork for a great deal of baseball research today when heproduced his baseball database. We owe a great deal here to the workhe put into and continues to put into his database.
Pete Palmer's work isthe basis for the Lahman database, and he has provided data to thissite as well, along with his business partner Gary Gillette.
Many of these stats are now available through the Baseball Databank.
DonMalcolm has encouraged us a great deal in this project and hashelped us develop many new ideas.
Doug Drinen hasdeveloped Pro-Football-Reference.com from scratch and is a fellowmathematician and stathead. He has provided a great deal of feedbackon the site.
Justin Kubatkodeveloped the counterpart basketball site and has provided manysuggestions as well.
Tom Ruane has contributed both data and advice to thiseffort. Tom works with retrosheet.org, a very, veryworthy cause. The game log and transaction data on the site isavailable at retrosheet free of charge.
Doug Pappas contributed salary and payroll information tothe site.
Keith Woolner was the original StatHead and his work atBaseball Prospectus and elsewhere has influenced our work here. Hecurrently works in the Guardians front office.
Collegiate Data appears courtesy SABR's Collegiate Committee. They will welcome all corrections to their data.
Much of the data is due to the volunteers at SABR.org, among whom some of us are ourselves.
The SABR biographical committee routinely puts out updates for newinformation (or even new ballplayers) found. This can include updatedbirth, name and death information.
The SABR Collegiatecommittee maintains the database of schools attended by players.
Jeffrey Burk provided me with the awards votingdata.
Derek Adair has contributed numerous corrections to the player dataand a variety of other data sets.
Jay Jaffe designedthe Babe Ruth logo.
Greg Spira has likewisecontributed advice and support to this effort.
Hundreds of others have e-mailed in corrections or contributed data.We apologize for not properly citing them here.
Much of this data is available through the Baseball-DataBank.org.
Current Data Sources
Tools
Perl is a robust scriptinglanguage. This whole site is built using perl.
MySQL is an open sourcedatabase. All of our data is stored and manipulated in MySQL.
Emacs is a free text editor withphenomenal capabilities if you sit down and learn them.
RedHat Linux is an open sourceoperating system. If you want the power of the command line on a PC,linux is a nice option.
I stopped using redhat a while back and now it's all built using Macs.
Philosophy of Baseball-Reference.com (May 1, 2004)
When I first hatched this idea, I had severaloverriding priorities for the site that had to be met before it wouldbe launched. Four years later, I think the popularity of thesite has shown that these are good things to build any product ofwebsite on.
- Useful - It needs to be comprehensive and the data must be easy to find.
- Fast - My site is fast because it has only ten imagesrepeated across the entire site, and the pages are small. The averageplayer page is 8KB and 95% of the pages are under 20KB. It is alsofast because every page is already created and you don't have to waitfor me to call a script to call a database to create a page.
- Embraces the medium -There are links everywhere. You visitTed Williams and want to see who his teammates were in 1950, so youclick on the team name, or you wonder who won the MVP in 1941, so youclick on the league. The web is built on links, and that is why theWilliams page has over 100 links on it, so you wonder something and*Click* you find out. That is also why it has to be fast.
- Fun - Writing thousands of lines of code may not sound fun,but it has been a blast putting this all together. I also want thesite to have a sense of humor and a personality, so I try to writefrom a personal viewpoint and there are a few inside jokes sprinkledaround.
Advice
There are two sites that provided much of the technical knowledgeand design philosophy for this site at its genesis. Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com and Philip Greenspun's Photo.net werevery helpful in creating this site and they are recommended to anyonedoing web design. Very, very helpful. Both Nielsenand Greenspunhave books that are worth checking out. Our library now has about 40or 50 web design/computer books in it, so these should just be viewedas starting points.
Sean Forman
July 1, 2004 (yes, really)
