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January 30-February 5, 2003

naked city

Vital Statistics

Home base: Forman, in his Mt. Airy home office, shows off a 1999 book to which he contributed -- his first official foray into the world of baseball stats. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Baseball Reference's Sean Forman finds strength in numbers.

by Brian Howard

"It's just a website full of baseball stats." That's the reaction you'd get from most observers stumbling upon the spartanly designed Baseball-Reference.com. And for the most part, they'd be right. But most observers aren't obsessed with the entrancing ebb and flow of baseball statistics like site-owner Sean Forman and the thousands of visitors responsible for millions of page views per month on his site, which turns three Feb. 1.

Baseball Reference, all blue and white and full of numbers, is elegant in its simplicity. It chronicles the entirety of major league baseball history in statistics, from the nine-team 1871 National Association through to the 2002 season.

The site consists of around 20,000 pages -- approximately 16,000 player pages and some 4,000 pages of teams, leaderboards, yearly schedules and others -- all of which interconnect in such a way that it's easy to lose an hour or a day wandering its links. A user logging on to investigate how many times Mike Schmidt led the league in home runs could quite easily end up on the page of Hall-of-Fame fireballer Bob Gibson in just a few logical clicks. And the link-hopping can go on ad infinitum.

For Forman, the reason for the site's existence is quite simple. "Because nobody else had done it," he states over coffee at Infusion café, near his Mt. Airy home. "If somebody else had had a perfectly fine site where you could find Ty Cobb's batting averages for each of the years of his career, I probably wouldn't have done it."

Growing up in Iowa, Forman developed a love for baseball at an early age. But it wasn't a Midwest team that caught his fancy. "In Iowa, you're equidistant from four major league teams, the Cubs, Twins, Royals and Cardinals," he explains. "I had never really latched on to any of them."

Rather, Forman developed a lifelong devotion to the most storied of snake-bitten teams, The Boston Red Sox.

"When I was growing up, I really liked the [Dwight] Evans, [Jim] Rice, [Fred] Lynn Red Sox outfield," he recalls. "I don't really have any recollection of the '78 season, but I suspect that that might have had something to do with it, when they lost on the Bucky Dent home run."

For Forman, a mathematician by trade (he's an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at St. Joseph's University), his love for the sport with by far the most stats has endured.

Forman began Baseball Reference while finishing up his doctorate from the University of Iowa. "My advisor [at Iowa] was spending a sabbatical year in Italy, and my wife had graduated a year ahead of me and was working in Georgia," he says. "We had just gotten married that summer, so I moved to Georgia. I had big plans: I was going to get my thesis done, but I got distracted."

The distraction was brief (he finished his thesis in November 2001 and was granted his Ph.D. that December). But the break gave him time to finish the site. Three years after Baseball Reference went live on a $20-a-month server, the site has exploded.

"I can see all the traffic," beams Forman. "I can't see any names, but some people look at 500 pages, 600 pages in a day. It's neat that people get lost in the site, and that's how I designed it."

As a card-carrying stat head (Forman is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, a.k.a. SABR, a group devoted to in-depth analysis of baseball metrics), the 31-year-old has become something of a stalwart among the "sabermetric" community (which includes Theo Epstein, the newly minted 29-year-old general manager of Forman's beloved Red Sox).

Baseball Reference, begun as an offshoot of a site called Big Bad Baseball, is now the flagship of a group of four sites called the Baseball Think Factory, which Forman runs with business partner Jim Furtado, a Fall River, Mass., firefighter.

Forman runs BaseballPrimer.com with Furtado, who maintains the other two. Primer, a news and analysis site coming up on its second birthday, has become an online hub for forward-thinking baseball analysis. Written by Forman, Furtado and a team of authors, Primer boasts voluminous content provided by the site's readers who come from far and wide.

"We're not close to filling up the server," figures Forman, "but we've got several gigabytes of data that people have produced. I'm sure the people who have written the most words on that site are not the authors but readers."

The whole endeavor is reasonably lucrative. While Primer brings in no money, page sponsorships on Reference, intended to fund server expenses when the site outgrew its first home, provide Forman with enough to cover his expenses with some left over for "a TIVO and maybe some Phillies games."

He's got a laundry list of improvements he'd like to make to the site, but his day job -- and the fact that Reference is a one-man show -- prohibits him from taking more on for the time being. He's turned down offers from the likes of ESPN, Fox Sports and Earthlink. It's his baby, and he's quite happy holding on to it.

"I've probably had eight people ask me for jobs, ask if we were hiring," says Forman, "which always makes my wife laugh, because it's just me in my office in my pajamas."