Tell us about the history of BR. When was it founded? What was your inspiration? Did you imagine it would get this big?

The site was started in February of 2000 as part of the Big Bad Baseball Annual website. It was spun off April 1st, 2000 into its own website.

I basically was looking for a baseball encyclopedia on-line, but couldn't find one anywhere else, so I decided to build my own. One thing that had held me back is that I wanted everything to be static, so no dynamic page creation, but I needed 300MB of space to do that, so once I found a company offering 500MB of space for $20/month, I knew I was in business and got to work. We are now up to four dedicated servers (for the various sites) and a 20GB database, but there has been a lot of steady growth between then and now.

I was a big usability nut back then, so I was really focussed on making it as easy to use as possible. I didn't really like use the paper encyclopedias as it was really slow to thumb around for data, so I tried to inter-connect pages as much as possible.

I didn't think it would be this big. The one guy who was really excited about it was Don Malcolm from the BBBA.
 

How in God's name did you input all that information and how do you continue to keep the site updated? Do you have a bunch of monkeys working for you?

The data was born in the Lahman Database which comes from in part from Pete Palmer's work with Total Baseball, so I haven't had to do a lot data entry. For the newer data like splits, box scores, etc. I'm using data from RetroSheet, so I've relied mostly on free data sources. For current season data I pay money for daily updates, and I've bought other data at times when I've needed it.

As for monkeys, I've been the only primate working on the site for most of its history, but now Justin Kubatko of Basketball-Reference.com is working with me full-time which I'm very excited about.
 

Is this a full-time gig for you, or do you have a non-baseball related job?

I left my teaching job at Saint Joe's University in Philly in May of 2006, and have been doing the site full-time since them. It was a little scary, but it was the right decision at the time and it has been going very well since them. Not surprisingly, my productivity has shot up since I'm no longer having to fit in time on nights and weekends.
 

What is your main source of revenue for BR?

Well, we've been doing a variety of things. Page sponsorships have been around for five years now. We launched the Play Index in December that is a subscription service that allows you to search through gamelogs and plays from the last 50 years. It is very cool stuff. I have several hundred writers, broadcasters and others who are members. It is open to everyone and just $29/year. We've just signed up with Federated Media to handle banner advertising on the site and if we sell a lot of t-shirts and hats at SABR this year, we may look at doing that on the site as well. I have a number of other ideas coming down the pike as well.
 

Describe the importance of sabermetrics in the development of BR.

It's important, but the bread and butter of the site is the basic, traditional data. Sites like Prospectus, HardballTimes, Fangraphs and some others have more sabermetric data than we have (though we are always looking to add more). I did a lot of writing for a sabermetric annual 8-12 years ago and also have generally followed the field, but to be honest, I think the site rises and falls more on my ability to present existing well-known data clearly and coherently, than providing the latest cutting edge of sabermetric research.
 

Are you aware of any professional baseball teams using your site in their evaluation of players?

I don't know about player evaluation, but there are teams that use the Play Index for game notes and other things. When I add in minor league data to the Play Index, you'll be able to do a little more on the player evaluation front. Several agents use the site religiously as well.
 

Do you have any plans to include more stats? K/9, VORP, WARP, BB/9, etc.

I'm going to do a re-vamp of the player and team pages this summer, so a lot more stuff will be on there than is now. VORP is proprietary to the Baseball Prospectus guys, so I doubt that it will appear on the site. Other similar numbers probably will appear. I'm open to suggestions. I'll probably be doing a call out for ideas at some
point this summer.
 

Explain some of the new features you have.

As part of the Play Index you can search for standard things like 3-HR games or all of a pitchers shutouts, but you can also do things like find the most consecutive games with a double by a Yankees catcher, or find all games where the pitcher threw a shutout and didn't strike anyone out. Or show me the last time the Yankees scored ten runs and lost. Or show me each PA where Alex Rodriguez hit a walk-off home run. You can search through 8m plays and 3m game logs in a matter of seconds. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

As part of that, we also added box scores, splits and player and team gamelogs for every season since 1957 and it is updated each morning.
 

Milk: Whole, 2%, 1%, or skim?

Usually skim, but when no one is looking I'll use my son's whole milk.
 

What is your vision for BR?

For baseball in particular, I see us eventually having game logs and possibly box scores for every game ever played. More data like single-game feats, uniform numbers, minor league numbers, and contract status. Our goal really is to be your one-stop shop for baseball information. I think in addition to baseball, we are going to start rolling our ideas and work into other sports to go along with the basketball and football sites we already have.

Here is a link to the play index.
http://www.bbref.com/pi/