Sean Forman: Baseball Reference Founder
MLB Heat | Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 1:51PM
Almost single-handedly Sean Forman fabricated and engineered what has become the go-to site to look up statistics for any baseball player or team. For serious baseball researchers, analysts, sportswriters, announcers, or historians, Baseball-Reference is often the first stop. Need we say more? You can keep up with Sean by visiting Baseball-Reference.com or of course Twitter ().
Baseball Analytics: What is your favorite ball park and why?
Sean Forman: I'm not sure I have an out and out favorite. I enjoyed Target Field a lot. It has a great downtown setting and you can get Walleye on a Stick there. I like parks that are set in actual neighborhoods. It's the one problem I have with Citizens Bank Park.
Baseball Analytics: What's the biggest challenge you face running a robust research site like Baseball Reference?
Sean Forman: The biggest challenge we have is figuring out how to prioritize the millions of new features we could add to the sites. We are a very small company, and ESPN's internal analytics group is probably five times our total headcount, so much of what we do is based on intuition and what our own itches are.
Baseball Analytics: How would you like the Hall of Fame and its voters to handle the steroids issue and its impact on the history of the game and potential inductees?
Sean Forman: My view (and I may have a vote in 7 years) is that voters should look at what happened on the field and go from there. I would not be surprised by it being revealed that a particular player took PED's. No revelation would surprise me. So for me, playing this gotcha game with Bonds, Clemens, Sosa etc is futile. Sure we know about some of them, but Babe Ruth and Pud Galvin were injecting themselves with ground up sheep and guinea pig testicles 100 years ago, so IMO we should look at what happened on the field and base votes on that.
Reader Comments (6)
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