Levy: Meet the Philly guy behind Baseball-Reference.com

From Dan Levy at BillyPenn.com on October 11, 2016, on SABR member Sean Forman:

As the world has become increasingly digital, and fewer and fewer salesmen traipse from door to door trying to sell monthly subscriptions to Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia — ‘you get A, B and C today and you’ll have Z by the end of next year!’ — the history of the world still needs recording. History can’t repeat itself, after all, if there was no one chronicling it the first time.

Now, sure, in today’s world it seems like every moment of the day is chronicled in some way, on some device, and uploaded to the cloud. But who is charged with making sense of all of that information and, more importantly, recording it in a way that will make sense to future generations? Google? Wikipedia? Snapchat?

For more than a decade and a half, for baseball writers and fans of America’s pastime, the answer has been Baseball Reference.

Created by a former St. Joe’s professor who started the stat-centric site 16 years ago, as he calls it, for fun, Baseball Reference has become a vital resource for everyone who covers the game, or simply loves its history.

Sean Forman, 44, is the man behind the site, and if you haven’t heard of him or his company Sports Reference before, you have undoubtedly, perhaps unwittingly, seen his work.

“I have to say I love it,” Forman told me over lunch last week, a few blocks past the Suburban Station stop he hit from his home in Mt. Airy. “I enjoy going to work every day and still write code. For me it’s really about the puzzle of figuring out what is the most useful way of presenting this information. Coming up with small touches that make things a lot easier for the user.”

Read the full article here: http://billypenn.com/2016/10/11/meet-the-mt-airy-guy-behind-baseball-reference-pro-sports-stats-empire/



Originally published: October 11, 2016. Last Updated: October 11, 2016.