Baseball-Reference.com
 With Baseball-Reference.com, Sean Forman has erected a massive temple of baseball knowledge on the Web. We make our daily pilgrimage to his site to check on box scores, stats, and the always engaging Stat of the Day blog. But that's just a tiny slice of the statistical smorgasbord Sean has prepared.
Wanna know who the league leaders in triples were in 1975? Check. Stats from the 1932 World Series? Check. Or Joe DiMaggio's career numbers? Check. You get the picture. Baseball Reference is devoted to hardball and the site packs a sweet swing for anyone who loves the national pastime. Sean was good enough to chat with us about baseball, stats, and why he left the world of academia for a career at the helm of baseball's most comprehensive site... Hey Sean, when did you start Baseball-Reference.com (BR)? What was the impetus? I started it in February of 2000. I was a big baseball fan and there weren't any encyclopedias online at the time, and I liked web design, so I decided to start one myself. Did you have a web site or web presence before BR? I had done design for a book site for "The Big Bad Baseball Annual." I ran a minor league site called the IowaFarmReport.com and I designed the website for the U of Iowa Math Department. Did you grow up a huge baseball fan? Or was it something you grew to appreciate over time? I grew up in Western Iowa where the nearest team is a four hour drive, so I didn't see many games in person, but I would watch it on TV and follow it in the paper. Did you have an interest in mathematics before you got into baseball stats? Which one was the chicken and which one was the egg? Math was always my best subject and I took to it very early, so I probably liked math first, but I was interested in both from an early age. When did you become obsessed with baseball stats? Has it always been a passion? I've always enjoyed it. My dad is a high school football coach, so before I was in high school I would track and compile the stats for his games. What were your goals when you started BR? I wanted it to be very easy to use, fast, and complete. I didn't necessarily ever expect it to be the full-time job that it has become. What's been the most surprising thing about running BR? The level of emotion that some of the pages cause for some people. I've had people e-mail me telling me they'd been searching for years for the box score of the first game they attended with their father, or that they were thankful that someone still remembered their grandfather who played three games for the Indians in 1922. When did you know BR had "made it"? Was there a seminal moment or tipping point? I figured I was onto something big when the site was profiled in Sports Illustrated in 2001. Beyond that, the site has grown by lots of little moments and many hours of plodding along adding new features. What's been the most gratifying thing about running BR? Hearing from the users who like the site and hearing that (professionals, writers, broadcasters, teams, and agents) use the site as much as they do. Have you ever heard from an MLB player who stumbled across your data? Dave Stieb game me some corrections to his yearly salaries. There have been a few others as well. Favorite baseball player? Why? I like the high OBP guys who can field a little. Wade Boggs and Rickey Henderson were boyhood heroes. Nowadays, I enjoy watching Chase Utley play, and Pedro Martinez in his prime was a thing of beauty. Do you have a favorite statistical quirk? No player with only one career game has ever hit a home run in that game. What spurred you to give up your professorship? Did you ever foresee BR becoming a full-time gig? I enjoyed being a college professor, but sometimes when I'm working on the site it's like I'm on fire and have to get a new feature out to see both for myself and others. The ideas just seem to flow for me in this line of work. All along I thought it might be a full-time job, but I didn't give up tenure and all of those trappings until I was pretty sure it would work. Have you published academic papers that have nothing to do with baseball? My PhD. thesis was on Protein Structure Prediction, which is a very important and challenging problem bridging biochemistry and applied math. Unfortunately, my contributions didn't move the field very far along. I created and published on a Genetic Algorithm that performs Congressional Redistricting for states. That was more successful. What's your relationship with the other Sports Reference sites? Are you fascinated by other sports stats? The basketball and pro football sites are run by friends of mine, and we are working towards forming a single company (almost done). I'll be president of that company. I love to see what other sites are doing. I'm really fascinated by data presentation in general. Of course, I've read Tufte, and I like what Bloomberg, Yahoo!, Google and many others do in this regard. What do you have up your sleeve for BR? You've compiled more data on baseball than any fan could have ever imagined. Is there stuff that's missing that you want to add? We will be adding 15 years of minor league data shortly. We will be building out the football data some more as well, and I'm working on a major re-working of the basic player stats pages. They haven't really been altered for 7 years now, and I've learned some new tricks that will improve them dramatically. And of course, more data. Thanks, Sean! You've created a site that's the perfect way to lead off the morning.
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