External links
- Official website
- USA Today articles
- Rochester D&C articles
- New York Sun articles
- Lahman's blog ("In Lahman's Terms")
Sean Lahman (born June 9, 1968) (pronounced "lay-men") [1] is an author and journalist. [2] He is currently a reporter for the USA Today Network and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle [3] and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open-source databases. [4] [5] [6] [7]
He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database, [8] 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. [9] [10] In addition to fostering research, the Lahman Database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Baseball Mogul and Out of the Park Baseball, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history. [11]
In the mid-1990s, Lahman created the first online baseball encyclopedia at his Baseball Archive website. [12] 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, [13] [14] and Lahman resurrected the Baseball Archive website as a platform to continue the free distribution of his database.
In October 2024, SABR announced that Lahman had donated the database to them, calling it "a keystone in our community" and "a research tool that has aided the work of millions of researchers." SABR announced that it planned to continue to update the database and make it available for free online every year. [15]
Since 2011, he has worked for the Society for American Baseball Research to coordinate data collection projects, [16] including an effort to build a database for minor league baseball [17] Since 2021, Lahman has taught a course on working with baseball databases as part of the annual SABR Analytics Confernce. [18] Lahman served on a task force that made recommendations on which Black leagues from baseball’s segregated era should be recognized as major leagues. [19]
Lahman's efforts to document the statistical history of sports have gone beyond baseball. During the 1990s and 2000s, he edited or contributed to the definitive encyclopedias for baseball, professional football, professional basketball, and tennis. [20] 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. In 2010, he served on a "blue ribbon" panel assembled by NFL Films for the ten-part documentary series called The Top 100: NFL's Greatest Players. [21] He has also appeared as a guest on the MLB Network show "Behind the Seams." [22]
From 1998 to 2007, Lahman was an editor or contributor to more than a dozen sports encyclopedias , [23] including:
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 received the Nelson Ross Award, presented annually for "outstanding achievement in pro football research and historiography" by the Pro Football Researchers Association.
Lahman has worked as a database reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle since 2010, where he has been a part of statewide and national investigative reporting teams for the USA Today Network. His work has won awards in a variety of disciplines, including feature writing, business reporting, spot news, and state government reporting. [24] His 2018 reporting on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's campaign fundraising [25] won the Associated Press First Amendment award. [26]
He has also won awards for his reporting on gun violence and the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.
Lahman was a senior editor for Total Sports Publishing from 1999 to 2001. He later served as a sports reporter for the New York Sun from 2003 until the paper's demise in 2008. [27]
The Columbus Panhandles were a professional American football team based in Columbus, Ohio. The club was founded in 1901 by workers at the Panhandle shops of the Pennsylvania Railroad. They were a part of the Ohio League from 1904 before folding after one season. Three years later, the team tried again, playing in the Ohio League from 1907 to 1919, not winning a championship, before becoming charter members of the American Professional Football Association (APFA) which became the National Football League (NFL).
The Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA) is an organization of researchers whose mission is to preserve and, in some cases, reconstruct professional American football history. It was founded on June 22, 1979 in Canton, Ohio by writer/historian Bob Carroll and six other football researchers and is currently headed by an executive committee led by its president, George Bozeka, and executive director Leon Elder. Membership in the organization includes some of professional football's foremost historians and authors. The organization is based in Guilford, New York.
John Abraham Thorn is a German-born American sports historian, author, and publisher. Since 2011, he has served as the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.
Pete Palmer is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built.
The 1920 APFA season was the inaugural season of the American Professional Football Association, renamed the National Football League in 1922. An agreement to form a league was made by four independent teams from Ohio on August 20, 1920, at Ralph Hay's office in Canton, Ohio, with plans to invite owners of more teams for a second meeting on September 17, 1920. The "American Professional Football Conference" (APFC) was made up of Hay's Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros, the Cleveland Tigers and the Dayton Triangles, who decided on a six-game schedule to play each other at home-and-away, an agreement to respect each other's player contracts, and to take a stand against signing college students whose class had not yet graduated.
David S. Neft is an American writer and historian who creates sports encyclopedias.
James Warren Benton was an American football player. He played professionally in the National Football League (NFL) with the Cleveland / Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears between 1938 and 1947. Benton was the first NFL receiver to gain more than 300 yards in a game, a record that stood for 40 years. He was selected for the National Football League 1940s All-Decade Team.
Mark Haynes is an American former professional football player who was a cornerback in the National Football League (NFL) who played for the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos from 1980 until 1989. He made three Pro Bowls while playing for New York and appeared in all three of Denver's Super Bowl teams in the 1980s.
Doug Pappas (1961–2004) was an American baseball writer and researcher who was considered a foremost expert on the business of baseball.
Richard Ernest Woodard was an American football center in the National Football League (NFL) for the New York Giants and Washington Redskins. Woodard also played in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) for the Los Angeles Dons.
Baseball Reference is a website providing baseball statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics. It offers a variety of advanced baseball sabermetrics in addition to traditional baseball "counting stats".
Alfred Louis Nesser was a professional American football guard and end. He played for seven teams: Akron Pros, Cleveland Bulldogs, Columbus Panhandles, Akron Indians, New York Giants, and Cleveland Indians in the National Football League (NFL) and the Cleveland Panthers in the first American Football League. He won NFL Championship titles with the Akron Pros in 1920 and the New York Giants in 1927. During his career, Nesser played against Charlie Copley, Fritz Pollard and Jim Thorpe.
Alton Court (Bud) Michaels was an American football running back.
Gary Gillette is a baseball writer, author, and editor. He is co-editor of both the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia and the ESPN Football Encyclopedia. For both series of books, he partnered with noted statistician Pete Palmer, as well as writers Sean Lahman and Matt Silverman.
The Yankee Stadium Legacy set is a 6,752-card compilation chronicling every single game the New York Yankees ever played at the original Yankee Stadium since April 18, 1923. The card set was manufactured by Upper Deck and made its official debut by being randomly inserted into packs of Upper Deck’s 2008 Series 1 Baseball.
The Nesser brothers were a group of American football-playing brothers who helped make up the most famous football family in the United States from 1907 until the mid-1920s. The group consisted of seven brothers who worked for Panhandle Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Columbus, Ohio, and who were later used as the foundation for the Columbus Panhandles of the Ohio League, and later the National Football League, when the club was founded by future NFL president Joe Carr in 1907.
David Robidoux is an American score composer. He writes film scores for various sporting films and networks, and primarily composes for NFL Films.
Peter C. Bjarkman was an American historian, freelance author, and commentator on the baseball played in Cuba after the 1959 Communist revolution. He provided regular internet commentary on Cuban League baseball as a contributing writer for LaVidaBaseball.com and as Senior Writer for the U.S.-based internet website BaseballdeCuba.com and appeared frequently on radio and television sports talk shows as an observer and analyst of the Cuban national sport. He also published more than three dozen books ranging in scope from Major League Baseball history and college and professional basketball history to sports biographies for young adult readers. In spring 2017 Bjarkman was honored with a SABR Henry Chadwick Award, the society's highest research recognition established in 2009, "to honor baseball's great researchers – historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists – for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America's present with its past".
Sports analytics are collections of relevant historical statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual by helping to inform players, coaches and other staff and help facilitate decision-making both during and prior to sporting events. The term "sports analytics" was popularized in mainstream sports culture following the release of the 2011 film Moneyball. In this film, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane relies heavily on the use of baseball analytics to build a competitive team on a minimal budget, building upon and extending the established practice of Sabermetrics.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
