Why Baseball-reference.com Is the Best Online Site in the World

The list of great things available through the Internet is endless. I cannot imagine a life without email. Others will sing the praises of ebay or online shopping. Some people love sites with live chat features. I understand porn is big online, too. Enjoy politics? Well whatever your political leanings, you'll have no trouble finding places to engage that passion.

But without a doubt, the finest site available online is baseball-reference.com and it's not even close.

If you check out the sources for any of my baseball articles, undoubtedly you'll find baseball-reference.com listed. The amount of information available at the site is nothing short of amazing. That's a major selling point. The design of the site is outstanding. The site is not cluttered with ads and the information dominates every page. It's all presented in a clear, easy-to-read format.

You can find information on players, teams, managers, leagues, playoff games, award winners, the draft, previews for the day's game, boxscores going back to 1957, splits available in a host of different categories and countless other things.

And the best news of all - it's free!

Baseball-reference.com is the brainchild of Sean Forman, a former college math professor at Saint Joseph's in Philadelphia. Forman used to teach and run the site, which began in 2000, but he quit his job at the college to focus full-time on his creation.

And we're all better off because of that decision.

In an interview in February of 2007 with SI.com, Forman was asked about the size of baseball-reference.com and he answered:

There are almost 17,000 players [in Major League history] -- we have a page for every one of them. We recently launched, in the last year and a half, a wiki, similar to the Wikipedia, and we're up to about 40,000 pages on that. We have 98,000 box score pages. In addition to all the player pages, we have pages for every team in Major League history, every league.

For the last 50 years, we have game logs and splits for every player. We have additional things like, you can find out how Bob Gibson did against every batter he faced, who was the most successful against him, who was the least successful. So it's kind of one of these things that has grown organically over the last seven years. I add new things. It kind of builds upon itself and gets larger and larger. Regenerating the site, from top to bottom, would probably take close to maybe three or four days of computer time.

Not content to rest of his laurels, Forman is constantly looking to improve the site. During the season, he launched a sister site called minors.baseball-reference.com where you can get the same outstanding information about Minor League Baseball for the past 16 years, with promises of more years to be added in the near future.

Ever run into a guy who tries to tell you he played Minor League baseball? Well, now you can bust him. Or you can say, "Wow! I see you hit .197 in Pocatello - you must be so proud."

Well, what if you're a communist who doesn't like baseball? Baseball-referene.com has related sites for football and basketball and a racing-reference site is in the works. And Sean Forman enjoys politics so perhaps a political site will be created in the future.

Now, the cynical among you must wonder if this site is so great how does it make any money. Well, there are some ads, but you'd be hard pressed to find a site with ads that are less intrusive.

And one of the neat features of the site is that you can sponsor individual players. All pages are up for sponsorship and you pay based on how popular the player (or team or what have you) is. You can get a little-known player for $10 a year or pay several hundred to sponsor a Hall of Famer.

When you sponsor a player, you get a few lines to promote your business or write a personal note. Here's the text from Tom Seaver's page, sponsored by Sam M.:

The greatest pitcher in the history of the National League, and my boyood idol. Whenever baseball threatens to drive you away, remember what it's like to root as a kid for a player like him. Terrific, indeed.

This year, baseball-reference.com added its play-index section, a pay area which lets you create customized lists. While traditional leaders are free to everyone, I was able to create a list of most stolen bases by a pitcher in a single season for my El Duque Hernandez article thanks to this new feature.

Anyone who enjoys baseball, history, statistics and clean design will enjoy this site. If you've never been there, you owe it to yourself to check it out now. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.