When I was growing up, my grandparents all knew I liked baseball and so, at Christmas, I would often get baseball-related gifts. I would get a ball, or a decoration, or a game, or a toy somehow related to baseball (or, as I call it, The Beautiful Game). Some of the gifts were cool and some were lame — it’s how these things work — but all in all, they were fine gifts for a child who mostly just liked having things to unrap, and if he still enjoyed the things he unwrapped several days later, well, great, so much the better.
One year, I got a big, thick book called Total Baseball. In it were the career stats of everyone to ever play Major League Baseball. If you wanted to look up literally anyone who had ever made the majors, you could. It was right there at your fingertips. You were immortal and powerful and within a minute you could know how many guys Fergie Jenkins struck out in 1974. At the time, it was incredible.
23 years ago yesterday, a website called Big Bad Baseball Stats was launched, or as we know it today, Baseball Reference dot com.
Total Baseball suddenly does not seem quite as cool. I mean, there’s no feature in it where you read the intro, see a vaguely familiar looking guy in a Nationals hat, click on him, realize it’s Joe Nathan, try to figure out why he’s wearing a Nationals hat, triple check his career line to make sure he didn’t spend any time as a National, go down to the Transactions page just to see if there are any hints there, while you’re at Transactions try to figure out how many years Boof Bonser pitched anyway…and so on. No book could allow you to quickly connect all those dots.
I mean, Total Baseball didn’t even have the Washington Nationals! They were still the Montreal Expos, who as a side note finally have no active players left in professional sports who they drafted, because Tom Brady finally retired from a totally different sport. Pickleball or whatever. I don’t pay much attention to guys who didn’t even sign when they were drafted. Why waste energy on a washed up catcher?
For the last 23 years, BB-Ref has been a leader in letting baseball fans easily look at stats so they can say, “Wow, that’s cool.” That might seem like it’s nothing, but it emphatically is not! Letting people who are marginally interested in baseball head down the rabbit hole and start discussing Travis Jackson’s OPS+ does the game a great service, because now they’re the kind of people who look up Travis Jackson’s career OPS+ (It was 101, by the way) and talk about it and get more people interested in some Giants shortstop from 100 years ago, which also gets them more interested in some Giants shoprtop on the team currently
This is legitimately one of the great advances in baseball’s history to get fans interested in baseball’s history. Sean Forman, who founded the site, should be in the Hall of Fame. Obviously he shouldn’t be in the player wing — though if Forman didn’t pay a ton of attention, I guess they could just use Pete Rose’s . It’s not like he’ll be using it!
Forman is a notable person who has created a notable product that has reshapen how people interact with the game of baseball. He certainly deserves to be in Cooperstown more than Bud Selig. And, of course, his success has spawned a wauve of followers, with Fangraphs the most notable. Fangraphs is also a great site, and it does plenty of unique things, but there’s only one original: Baseball Reference.
Perhaps the day will come when Bain Capital will buy out BB-Ref, strip it for parts, then call it unproftiable and sell its dead husk. If and when that day comes, well, first, I hope that Sean Forman makes out like a bandit and gets rich, but second, it’ll be a dark day for everyone else.
Baseball Reference is a great site for everyone to use and enjoy, and I hope it stays around forever. Today, on its 23rd birthday plus one day, I will make my stand and say: I like Baseball Reference. Baseball Reference is good and fun. All hail Baseball Reference.
This is a really really great Ode to BRef. Well done and bravo. I'm on that website multiple times a day. In fact I just learned that the RHP who hurled 1.1 innings to earn the save for Mexico over Dominican Republic in today's 5-4 Serie Caribe game is none other than Jake Sanchez. An undrafted 6 year MiLB veteran with multiple AAA deployments before taking his talents to Mexico. All well and good but I literally squealed when I then learned that not only were he and Sergio Romo bullpen mates for Mexico in the 2019 Serie Caribe....but they both graduated from Brawley Union High School, 6 years apart!
Naturally, I am now a Jake Sanchez fan for life. Vamos Mexico & gracias BRef.