Sean Forman invited me to blog here about SABR's Baseball Biography Project. With the help of many people, I created this project back in 2002 and, with the help of even more people, have been its director ever since. I welcome the opportunity to promote all of the great research the project has produced over the past nine years, and to keep readers up-to-date as the project evolves.

SABR does a lot of great things--statistics, records, the Negro Leagues, minor leagues, oral history, the origins of the game, etc.--and researching the lives of baseball players is one of them. If you are not a SABR member, I urge you to join, if for no other reason than to help us with this huge endeavor.

The goal of the project, nine years ago and today, is to research and write sourced journal-quality biographies of baseball players (and managers, executives, umpires, etc.) and house them all in an easy-to-use on-line library. We have expanded this goal a little (hosting biographies of ballparks, for one thing), but primarily we have not changed our focus.

The way the project works is simple: you "claim" a subject, you research that person's life, you write the article, you send it to us, we edit it, you and the editor agree on the final version, we post it on our site. You then brag about your accomplishment on Facebook, become more popular with your friends, and sign up to do it all again.

This is our site.

As I write this, we have 1519 articles posted, of which about 1480 are biographies. I have six more to post later today. As there have been 17,000 major league players (not to mention many other people who warrant a biography), we have some work to do. We have over 1000 biographies assigned to writers at the moment, and the project has never been healthier or more active.

One of the guiding philosophies of the project is that we do not attempt to guide people to one subject over another. We created a process and a web site, and then we just see what comes in. So while we have 141 Hall of Famers, we also have 44 players who played in just a single game. We have all of the Black Sox, but no Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle. No matter what area you are interested in, there is more work to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.