Baseball Reference
Baseball-Reference.com is a comprehensive online database providing detailed statistics, scores, and historical records for Major League Baseball players, teams, and leagues, extending coverage to minor leagues, international competitions, Negro Leagues, college baseball, and other formats dating back to the 19th century.[1][2]
Founded in April 2000 by physicist Sean Forman as a personal project while he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, the site rapidly expanded through user contributions, data digitization from sources like The Baseball Encyclopedia, and integration of advanced metrics such as Wins Above Replacement (WAR).[3][4][5]
Under Sports Reference LLC, which Forman established to manage the platform alongside sister sites for other sports, Baseball-Reference has grown into a cornerstone for statistical analysis, featuring tools like Stathead for custom queries and daily updates on games, rosters, and leaderboards, serving millions of users including media outlets, scouts, and sabermetricians without reliance on subjective narratives.[6][4][1]