If you enjoy this site, it is only due to a great amount of work by a large number of people.
Jim Furtado has helped in a myriad of ways, server support, advice, humor and we worked together on Baseball Primer which he has taken over and renamed The Baseball Think Factory.
Sean Lahman laid the groundwork for a great deal of baseball research today when he produced his baseball database. We owe a great deal here to the work he put into and continues to put into his database.
Pete Palmer's work is the basis for the Lahman database, and he has provided data to this site as well, along with his business partner Gary Gillette.
Many of these stats are now available through the Baseball Databank.
Don Malcolm has encouraged me a great deal in this project and has helped me develop many new ideas.
Doug Drinen has developed Pro-Football-Reference.com from scratch and is a fellow mathematician and stathead. He has provided a great deal of feedback on the site.
Justin Kubatko developed the counterpart basketball site and has provided many suggestions as well.
Tom Ruane has contributed both data and advice to this effort. Tom works with retrosheet.org, a very, very worthy cause. The game log and transaction data on the site is available at retrosheet free of charge.
Doug Pappas contributed salary and payroll information to the site.
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 I count myself.
The SABR biographical committee routinely puts out updates for new information (or even new ballplayers) found. This can include updated birth, name and death information.
The SABR Collegiate committee maintains the database of schools attended by players.
Jeffrey Burk provided me with the awards voting data.
Derek Adair has contributed numerous corrections to the player data and a variety of other data sets.
Jay Jaffe designed the Babe Ruth logo.
Greg Spira has likewise contributed advice and support to this effort.
Hundreds of others have e-mailed in corrections or contributed data. I apologize for not properly citing them here.
Much of this data is available through the Baseball-DataBank.org.
Perl is a robust scripting language. This whole site is built using perl.
MySQL is an open source database. All of our data is stored and manipulated in MySQL.
Emacs is a free text editor with phenomenal capabilities if you sit down and learn them. I do all of my writing in Emacs.
RedHat Linux is an open source operating system. If you want the power of the command line on a PC, linux is a nice option.
When I first hatched this idea, I had several overriding priorities for the site that had to be met before it would be launched. Four years later, I think the popularity of the site has shown that these are good things to build any product of website 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 images repeated across the entire site, and the pages are small. The average player page is 8KB and 95% of the pages are under 20KB. It is also fast because every page is already created and you don't have to wait for me to call a script to call a database to create a page.
- Embraces the medium -There are links everywhere. You visit Ted Williams and want to see who his teammates were in 1950, so you click on the team name, or you wonder who won the MVP in 1941, so you click on the league. The web is built on links, and that is why the Williams 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 the site to have a sense of humor and a personality, so I try to write from a personal viewpoint and there are a few inside jokes sprinkled around.
Advice
There are two sites that provided much of the technical knowledge and design philosophy for this site at its genesis. Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com and Philip Greenspun's Photo.net were very helpful in creating this site and I recommend them to anyone doing web design. Very, very helpful. Both Nielsen and Greenspun have books that are worth checking out. My library now has about 40 or 50 web design/computer books in it, so these should just be viewed as starting points.
Sean Forman
July 1, 2004
Stats updated through May 10, 2008.
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