The Baseball Archive was launched in 1995, making it the oldest continually operating baseball site on the web. It began as my effort to collect baseball information in one place for my own use. As a freelance writer and baseball enthusiast, having this sort of information at my fingertips was an invaluable resource

I was using the world wide web in its infancy, and my first web page was simply a list of links to other bits of baseball information. I'd cobbled together a pretty good baseball almanac by linking to other sources. In those early days, web pages would come and go, and I spent a lot of time trying to find new sources to replace the ones that disappeared. Evenetually, it dawned on me to simply start creating my own content. It started with a list of world series winners, and with each passing day I'd add a new list or write an article on some baseball subject. Before long, I'd created hundreds of pages, and the site was getting more traffic than I could manage.

Pulling data together from a variety of sources, I eventually built a complete database of baseball statistics, and in 1996 I released the whole thing -- free of charge -- on the website. It was a bold move, but one that was necessary.

Anybody of my generation who was interested in baseball research had been inspired by the works of Bill James. In his 1984 book, James lamented that research was tremendously hindered by the fact that the game's statistics were so closely guarded by those who compiled them (namely the Elias Sports Bureau). More than ten years had passed, and despite the technological advances, nothing had changed. I saw the hunger for that data from the dozens of requests I received each week, and I doled out reports to everyone who asked. But I wasn't interested in being a gatekeeper. In the end, I was a baseball consumer, and I knew that people who were smarter and more creative than I was could do useful and interesting things with it. Even though I knew I'd draw the ire of other stats providers, I did it anyway. And while I still take shots for what I did, the results have been extraordinary.

There is no shortage of baseball information on the web, and by the early 2000s, the need for me to continue building my site was eliminated. Sean Holtz launched the Baseball Almanac , which essentially took my original concept and expanded on it. I had an online baseball encyclopedia, but Sean Forman created a much better one. His superior design was more user friendly, and the end result -- Baseball-Reference.com -- is one of the two or three most important advances for baseball research in the last 25 years. People like Randy Myers and Lee Sinnis has also helped to take the baseball encylopedia into the digital age by building great software tools to help people work with the raw data.

Another great impact of my work has been in the gaming community, where a number of baseball games and simulations have made it possible to recreate past seasons using the Lahman Database.

My work continues, and fortunately I'm not alone. There's more baseball information available today than at any time in history, and that's led to both important new research and a surge of intrerest in baseball history. Maybe I played a role in helping that happen... that's for others to decide, I suppose. But as a baseball fan and a consumer, I couldnt be happier with the current state of things.

 --Sean Lahman, February 2007