Baseball-Reference.com is a website that has statistical information on every Major League Baseball (MLB) player, team, manager, ballpark, award winner, etc. since 1871. It also contains statistics from the minor leagues, pro-baseball from Japan, Korea, Cuba and the Negro League. Baseball-Reference.com was launched in 2000 by Dr Sean Forman who has a PhD in Applied Mathematics. Baseball-Reference.com is a part of Sports Reference LLC, which Dr Forman created, with the mission to “answer our users’ questions with the easiest-to-use, fastest and most complete sports statistics anywhere”. In addition to the statistical information, Baseball-Reference.com has its own Wiki baseball encyclopedia called the Baseball Reference Bullpen.
One of the main strengths of Baseball-Reference.com is its comprehensiveness. It counts traditional statistics along sabermetrics that track in-game activity. There is also a Play Index feature where users can create statistical leaderboards on variables they deem important – such as but not limited to: players, teams, position, age, type of game, streaks, splits, single-season and multi-year. The sheer number, types and combinations of statistical information available are staggering. Thus, Baseball-Reference.com’s greatest strength of comprehensiveness can lead to a slight weakness in ease of navigability. It is easy to get lost in all the numbers, but the learning curve is small and a user can quickly become accustomed to using the website. There is a search box at the top of the page that has search help subject strings and tabs across the top of the page that have all the major statistical categories, and the rest of the page is mostly dedicated to current baseball statistics such as team standings, draft news and league leaders. In addition, just about every text on the page is hyperlinked, ready to take you down the statistical rabbit hole.
Currency and accuracy of statistics on this website are excellent. Player and team stats are updated daily with various options to export and share data tables on whatever is your search query. On the front page, using More and About, the user can inquire about Baseball-Reference.com’s data collecting techniques, sources, limitations and their methodology for probability statistics.
Baseball-Reference.com is a perfect supplementary website for seekers of baseball statistics. Users of this type of information could be sports fans, fantasy league players, sports writers and scouts. Users will want to cross-reference any statistical information they find, and Baseball-Reference.com is an ideal source for this purpose. With its wide-ranging categories, the ability to go through seasons back to 1871, links to minor league records, international baseball league records and custom statistical reports, it is well-suited to supplementing and verifying data located from other, less reliable or comprehensive, sources.
The majority of this website is free. There are some advertisements on this site and you can purchase an advertisement free version of Baseball-Reference.com. Some of the Play Index features are at a fee but many are not.
I have personally used Baseball-Reference.com and Basketball-Reference.com (which is under the Sports Reference LLC umbrella) in both public and academic library settings. One effective way to build rapport among library patrons is through sports. For example, I showed one patron, who was into fantasy league baseball, Baseball-Reference.com’s batter’s statistics, specifically how to analyze year to year statistics and individual statistics versus a particular pitcher. The patron’s reaction was priceless: wide-eyed and speechless. Baseball-Reference.com is a game changer and I highly recommend it.
