Sean Forman

Sean Forman

• School Grinnell College, University of Iowa

• Born December 14, 1971 in Iowa, USA

Biographical Information

Sean Forman was a mathematics professor at St. Joseph's University and is a baseball researcher. On April 1, 2000, he launched Baseball-Reference.com, which soon became one of the most popular statistical sites on the internet thanks to its simplified format in an age of dial-up connections when fancier sites took forever to load, and also because it included stats not covered in those forums. The site has greatly expanded since then and in 2005 the BR Bullpen was created to add biographical and historical information to the numbers. This site would not exist if not for the work of Sean. He was also one of the founders of Baseball Think Factory.

In 2006 he won the award for best oral research presentation at the annual SABR convention and in 2011 he was honored with the Henry Chadwick Award.

Sean grew up in Iowa and earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences form the University of Iowa. He became a tenured professor of mathematics and computer science at St. Joseph's University, but resigned in 2006 in order to devote his full attention to B-R.com, which has since expanded to become Sports Reference LLC, which makes detailed statistics available for a series of professional and college sports. In 2021, he was at the forefront of efforts to integrate the statistics of players from the Negro Leagues into the major league statistical record, and co-edited a book explaining some of the issues related to developing a full statistical record for the Negro Leagues.

Further Reading

• Sean Forman and Cecilia M. Tan, eds.: The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues: Essays and Research for Overdue Recognition, Baseball-Reference and SABR, Phoenix, AZ, 2021. ISBN ISBN 978-1-970159-63-9
• Dan Levitt: "Sean Forman", in The Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Volume 40, Number 1 (Spring 2011), p. 123.
• User:Admin

Related Sites

• SABR tribute page