Today, he’s the database specialist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, but he continues to work on baseball statistics in his spare time. And the researchers with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) have done great work to fill in the gaps in the record, documenting things like Hall of Fame ballot totals and so forth.” Hall of Fame ballot totals in OOTP 16. He’s the one who meticulously built the data that appears in most of the printed encyclopedias published in the last forty years, from Total Baseball to the ESPN encyclopedias to. “However, my efforts have been meager compared to the giants of baseball research, primarily the work of Pete Palmer. “Some of that stuff is available on the Internet now, but there’s a lot of valuable information in file cabinets and desk drawers across the country. “I spent a lot of time at the Research Library at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and more time than I’d care to admit looking at newspaper accounts on microfilm at various public libraries,” he says. The further back one goes in baseball’s history, the less complete the record-keeping was, but that didn’t deter Lahman as he dove into his project. I did not set out to create a digital version of the encyclopedia, but that’s what happened.” These stats are in OOTP thanks to Sean Lahman and others whose work he built on. “I started by creating a spreadsheet with player statistics from one season, typing them in from my dog-eared copy of the baseball encyclopedia. “It started because I was a gamer, and I needed data to create my own player cards,” he says. The desire to tinker with home-brewed baseball sims is what led to the creation of his database. Console games tended to rely less on statistical simulation and more on hand-eye coordination, so my interest in those never really took off.” Odds are that if I heard of it, I probably played it. He adds: “I was a fan of the earliest computer games, particularly Earl Weaver Baseball, and the scores of other games that came out in the 1980s and 1990s. I bought just about every one that I could find, and with a friend even made some of our own.”
In high school, there were groups of us who played Strat-o-matic baseball (and football), and I was infatuated with these type of simulations. I played a lot of solo games, and joined some play-by-mail leagues as well. “My parents gave it to me as a Christmas present in 1981, when I was 13. “I started with a table top game called Statis-Pro Baseball, which was put out by the Avalon Hill game company,” he recalls. We wanted to learn more about how the database came about, and how he got involved with OOTP and sims in general, so we dropped him a line. Sean Lahman‘s name is well-known to many long-time players of Out of the Park Baseball, thanks to his popular database of historical player statistics that the game uses, as well as the exposure he gave OOTP during its early years.
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