Sean Lahman
Encyclopedia
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
.
Sports Research
He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database, a collection of baseball statistics for every team and player in Major League
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
history. Starting in 1995, he made this database freely available for download from the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, helping to launch a new era of baseball research
Sabermetrics
Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research...
by making the raw data available to everyone. In addition to fostering research, the Lahman Database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Baseball Mogul
Baseball Mogul
Baseball Mogul is a series of career baseball management computer games created by game designer Clay Dreslough. The product was first published in 1997. The thirteenth and latest installment, Baseball Mogul 2012, was released March 18, 2011. A proprietary database, included with the game, permits...
and Out of the Park Baseball
Out of the Park Baseball
Out of the Park Baseball, abbreviated as OOTP, is a text-based baseball simulator for career, historical, and fictional play. OOTP was originally written in 1998, when lead developer Markus Heinsohn sought to combine realistic replay baseball simulation with career play to satisfy hardcore fans and...
, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history.
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.
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
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
. In the late 1990s, Lahman launched the Football Project, an effort to collect, digitize, and distribute play-by-play accounts from NFL
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
games back to 1920.
Books
From 1998 to 2007, Lahman was an editor or contributor to more than a dozen sports encyclopedias, 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 Pro 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
Pro Football Prospectus
Pro Football Prospectus is a book series, with a new edition published each year. It reviews the previous NFL season and previews the upcoming season...
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.
. It also won the 2008 Nelson Ross Award, presented annually for "outstanding achievement in pro football
research and historiography."
Other Writing
Lahman was senior editor for Total Sports PublishingTotal Sports Publishing
Total Sports Publishing refers to a book publishing company based in Kingston, New York, that operated from 1998 to 2002. Prominent author John Thorn served as the division's publisher throughout its existence.-Total Sports:...
from 1999 to 2001. He later served as a sports reporter
Sports journalism
Sports journalism is a form of journalism that reports on sports topics and events.While the sports department within some newspapers has been mockingly called the toy department, because sports journalists do not concern themselves with the 'serious' topics covered by the news desk, sports...
for the New York Sun
New York Sun
The New York Sun was a weekday daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 to 2008. When it debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of an otherwise unrelated earlier New York paper, The Sun , it became the first general-interest broadsheet newspaper to be started...
from 2003 until the paper's demise in 2008.
His work has also appeared in publications like Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
, the New York Times, and Sport magazine
Sport magazine
SPORT magazine was an American sports magazine. Launched in September 1946 by the New York-based publisher, Macfadden Publications, SPORT pioneered the generous use of color photography – it carried eight full colour plates in its first edition – and almost immediately became half-bible, half-guru...
and at popular websites such as ESPN.com
ESPN.com
ESPN.com is the official website of ESPN and a division of ESPN Inc. Since launching in 1995 as ESPNet.SportsZone.com, the website has developed numerous sections including: Page 2, SportsNation, ESPN 3.com, ESPN Motion, My ESPN, ESPN Sports Travel, ESPN Video Games, ESPN Insider, ESPN.com's...
and CBS Sportsline.com. During the 1990s, he also wrote two computer-related books: Relational Databases and Building Data-Driven Web Sites.
He currently is a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism
Database journalism
Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in information management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of data, as opposed to news stories....
, data mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
and open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
databases.