Womack: An interview with Baseball-Reference founder Sean Forman
From SABR member Graham Womack at Baseball Past and Present on June 19, 2013, with SABR member Sean Forman:
I joke sometimes that if I were ever marooned on a desert island and could bring one thing, I might take Baseball-Reference.com with me. The world’s greatest baseball website has enough content to keep a hardened fan or researcher occupied for months if not years. I’ve certainly killed weekends on it.
I was lucky enough recently to talk with Sean Forman, the founder of Baseball-Reference.com and its overarching group of businesses, Sports Reference LLC. Excerpts from our phone conversation are as follows:
BPP: How many pages do you have overall on Baseball-Reference? I’ll say just Baseball-Reference right now. Do you have over a million pages on the site?
Forman: Oh yeah. Just box scores, we have 200,000 box scores.
Oh whoa.
And then, we have probably 200,000-300,000 pages in the minor league players, total, who have pages. Then you’ve got another 40,000 teams. You’ve got 2,000 teams in the major leagues, plus then we’ve got like 10 different pages for each season. I’m guessing we’re into the millions, just to count splits, game logs, the whole nine yards. It’s probably well over a million. I’m sure there are over a million. There could be over two million distinct pages on the site.
When you’re dealing with as large of an entity as Sports-Reference, what keeps you on-track and keeps you focused? I would think it would be so easy to get off-track and go off in a bunch of different directions.
It is. It’s… yeah, I’m not sure we are on-track. [laughs] We try to do some planning. We obviously have to fix any mistakes or bugs that people find. But yeah, it’s always challenging to make sure we’re making big strides rather than small steps that aren’t getting us where we want to go. It’s a challenge. That’s probably true of anybody trying to stay focused on what they want to be doing.
Read the full article here: http://baseballpastandpresent.com/2013/06/18/interview-sean-forman/
Originally published: June 19, 2013. Last Updated: June 19, 2013.