The Lahman Baseball Database offers player- and team-level stats all the way back to 1871 as freely downloadable files. It includes over 20,000 players and has been cited by 192 academic papers. That sounds like something that takes an enormous amount of effort to put together, but it seems to have been compiled by just one guy, journalist Sean Lahman.
This looks like yet another example of a lone individual outperforming the huge, well-funded institutions you might expect to compile such datasets- this time not the government but MLB, ESPN, et c.
But as we saw last week, lone individuals can’t keep it up forever. If you want your creation to last, you will eventually need an institution. In this case, Lahman recently passed his database on to the Society for American Baseball Research:
Sean Lahman has graciously agreed to donate the Lahman Baseball Database, an open source collection of historical baseball statistics, to SABR.
The Lahman Baseball Database — which Lahman created in 1996 and has made freely available online every year since then — contains complete batting and pitching statistics back to 1871, plus fielding statistics, standings, team stats, managerial records, postseason data, and more. While Lahman and others had previously released smaller datasets online, his database allowed researchers to perform complex queries across the entire history of the game for the first time. The Lahman Baseball Database has served as the foundation for many popular baseball research projects and simulation games, including Out of the Park Baseball and Baseball Mogul.
SABR plans to continue to update the database and make it available for free online every year at SABR.org/lahman-database.
I can only hope more of us will compile datasets worth handing off to an institution that will keep updating them.
Economist Writing Every Day 