Sean Lahman

Sean Lahman is a sportswriter, researcher, and archivist.

Unlike most baseball writers in the post-Bill_James era, Lahman eschewed number crunching and statistical analysis to focus on collecting and publishing raw source material for sports researchers. He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database[1], a collection of baseball statistics for every team and player in Major League history. Starting in 1995, he made this database freely available for download from the Internet, helping to launch a new era of baseball research by making the raw data available to everyone. This database is used as the underlying content for the Baseball-Reference website. In 2024, he announced that he would be donating the database to SABR to ensure that it will be properly maintained in the future and continue to be available free of charge.

Lahman was co-editor or contributor to the last three editions of Total Baseball and a contributor to every edition of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. His efforts to document the statistical history of sports have gone beyond baseball. Since the late 1990s, Lahman has also edited or contributed to the definitive encyclopedias for baseball, professional football, professional basketball, and tennis. His 2008 Pro Football Historical Abstract was named "Best Football Book of the Decade" by the Pro Football Researchers Association.

In addition to these encyclopedias, Lahman is the author of several books on sports history. He was a columnist for the New York Sun from 2001-2008, and later worked as a reporter for USA Today.

He attended the University of Cincinnati and resides in Rochester, NY where he works as a communications specialist.