Sean Lahman (born June 9, 1968) (pronounced "lay-men") is an author and journalist. He is currently a reporter for the USA Today Network and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open-source databases. Sports research He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database, 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. In addition to fostering research, the Lahman Database also made it possible for baseball simulation games, such as Baseball Mogul and Out of the Park Baseball, to recreate historical seasons from actual baseball history. In the mid-1990s, Lahman created the first online baseball encyclopedia at his Baseball Archive website. He later sold the website to Total Sports and became senior editor for that company's print publishing division. The encyclopedia disappeared from the web when Total Sports declared bankruptcy. It was later reborn as Baseball-Reference.com, and Lahman resurrected the Baseball Archive website as a platform to continue the free distribution of his database. Since 2011, he has worked for the Society for American Baseball Research to coordinate data collection projects, including an effort to build a database for minor league baseball In 2021, Lahman served on a task force that made recommendations on which Black leagues from baseball’s segregated era should be recognized as major leagues. Lahman's efforts to document the statistical history of sports have gone beyond baseball. During the 1990s and 2000s, he edited or contributed to the definitive encyclopedias for baseball, professional football, professional basketball, and tennis. In the late 1990s, Lahman launched the Football Project, an effort to collect, digitize, and distribute play-by-play accounts from NFL games back to 1920. In 2010, he served on a "blue ribbon" panel assembled by NFL Films for the ten-part documentary series called The Top 100: NFL's Greatest Players. He has also appeared as a guest on the MLB Network show "Behind the Seams." Books From 1998 to 2007, Lahman was an editor or contributor to more than a dozen sports encyclopedias , including: three editions of Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia two editions of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia Total