It is important to note that we are focusing on the statistical data available on the sites below. The rest of this section will discuss what is available on each of these sites (and several others not included above). While each of the sites above provided the same answer to our original question (Derek Jeter had 188 hits in 2004), they also provided a wide range of presentation styles and additional information. So let’s start by answering a sample question: how many hits did Derek Jeter have in 2004? Here are some places that will answer that question: Note: some of these sites also provide data for downloading, but this will be discussed in the next section. In many ways, these sites simply provide on-line baseball encyclopedias and their visitors access them in much the same way people have been accessing print encyclopedias for decades. And while they will let you search for data (by player or team name, for example) and will often even let you sort the data, they are not usually designed to let you answer complicated questions.

Of course, just about anything that can be browsed on the internet can also be downloaded (“File”->”Save Page As”), but these sites normally present their data scattered over thousands of pages and in many different formats. This section will focus on data that is made available primarily for browsing. So what can we find on the Internet and where can we find it? We will break the answer to this question into two parts: sites that let us browse statistical data and sites that let us download it. Few of these sites even existed back at the beginning of the millenium and most of those that did have changed almost beyond recognition.

This chapter will describe some of the Internet’s best sources of baseball data. And it isn’t only that computer and Internet speeds are more than an order of magnitude faster than they were back at the end of the last century there has been a tremendous increase in the amount of information available as well. This was true in 2000 when How to Do Baseball Research was originally published and it is even more true today. It’s a good time to be a baseball researcher with a computer.

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