Sean Lahman

Sean Lahman (born June 9, 1968) is a sports historian, writer, statistician, and archivist. Unlike most sports writers in the post-Bill James era, Lahman eschewed number crunching and statistical analysis to focus on collecting and publishing raw source material for sports researchers.

Research & Database Construction

He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database [Citation
url=http://baseball1.com/content/category/6/36/82/
title=Lahman Baseball Database download page
accessdate=2008-10-05] , a collection of baseball statistics for every team and player in Major League history. Starting in 1995, he made this database freely available for download from the Internet, helping to launch a new era of baseball research by making the raw data available to everyone.

In the mid 1990s, Lahman created the first online baseball encyclopedia at his Baseball Archive website. He later sold the website to Total Sports and became senior editor for that company's print publishing division. The encyclopedia disappeared from the web when Total Sports declared bankruptcy. It was later reborn as Baseball-Reference.com, and Lahman resurrected the Baseball Archive website as a platform to continue the free distribution of his database.

In addition to fostering research, the Lahman Database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Out of the Park Baseball, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history.

Lahman's efforts to document the statistical history of sports have gone beyond baseball. Since the late 1990s, he has edited or contributed to the definitive encyclopedias for baseball, professional football, professional basketball, and tennis. In the late 1990s, Lahman launched the Football Project, an effort to collect, digitize, and distribute play-by-play accounts from NFL games back to 1920.

Books

From 1998 to 2007, Lahman was an editor or contributor to more than a dozen sports encyclopedias [Citation
url=http://seanlahman.com/books/booklist.html
title=List of Sean Lahman's Books
accessdate=2008-10-05] , including:
* three editions of "Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball"
* five editions of the "ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia"
* two editions of the "ESPN Football Encyclopedia"
* "Total Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia"
* "Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia"
* "Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia"

In addition to these encyclopedias, Lahman has written several other books on sports history. He created the annual Pro Football Prospectus in 2002 and produced the first three editions in the series. His 2008 book "The Pro Football Historical Abstract" was called "the best football book of the decade" by members of the Pro Football Researchers Association. [Citation
url=http://www.pfraforum.org/index.php?showtopic=399
title=Pro Football Researchers Association
accessdate=2008-10-05]

Other Writing

Lahman was senior editor for Total Sports Publishing from 1999 to 2001. He later served as sports columnist for the New York Sun from 2001 until the paper's demise in 2008. [Citation
url=http://www.nysun.com/authors/Sean+Lahman
title=New York Sun archive
accessdate=2008-10-05] His work has also appeared in publications like Wired, the New York Times, and Sport magazine and at popular websites such as ESPN.com and CBS Sportsline.com.

External links

* [http://seanlahman.com Official Website]
* [http://seanlahman.blogspot.com Lahman's blog ("In Lahman's Terms")]
* [http://baseball1.com The Baseball Archive]
* [http://footballproject.com The Football Project]

References