About
Baseball Records is a browser for the Lahman Baseball Database, covering every major-league season from 1871 to 2025 — players, seasons, franchises and leaders. It runs entirely on your device: there is no server, no account, and no tracking.
The data
All statistics come from the Lahman Baseball Database, copyright © 1996–2025 SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), via generous donation from Sean Lahman. It is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence, and the data files this app downloads are shared under that same licence.
Changes made to the database
The data files here are modified derivatives rather than verbatim copies. Each carries only the columns the app reads; a career-games column is added to the player file; the franchise files are new tables with no counterpart in the original, reconstructing every rename and relocation from the per-season team rows; and the Hall of Fame file keeps inducted members only. No statistic has been altered.
What the source can and cannot say
A club's ballparks are worked out from its name, because that is the only link the database offers: the park table has no team column, and a season records its ground as free text. Most names settle themselves, but thirty-nine belong to more than one building — there are three Columbia Parks and two Wrigley Fields — and for those the app chooses the ground the surrounding seasons and the club's own city point to. It is right far more often than a first match would be, and it is still a choice rather than a record. Three seasons cannot be placed at all.
A ballpark's other names carry no dates in the source, so they are listed as names the ground went by rather than beside a span that would imply one. Where the season table and the park table spell the same ground differently, the two are read as one building.
Team names are what a club was called in a season, which is not always what it was formally named: Brooklyn is filed as the Dodgers, then the Superbas, then the Robins for eighteen years, then the Dodgers again. The places a club is listed under come from those names too, so they follow how a club branded itself — Minnesota and Texas rather than Bloomington and Arlington — and a club that drops its city from its name, as the Athletics did in 2025, has none to give.
Which leagues count
Leaderboards rank every league in the database. All of them are major-league caliber by SABR's reckoning, including the barnstorming clubs — the Cuban X Giants, Philadelphia Giants, Brooklyn Royal Giants and their peers — which SABR describes as “selected as major league caliber in light of the economic and social conditions that forced them to play outside a typical league structure.” Segregation is why those clubs have no league to be listed under, so they are ranked alongside everyone else.
Rate titles use the official qualifier of 3.1 plate appearances, or one inning pitched, per game the player's own league scheduled — not per game the longest league that year played, which would hold a short schedule to someone else's bar. Schedule length counts games that were decided, since tie games were replayed rather than settled and were never part of the schedule. That bar is floored at a 40-game schedule so a handful of recorded games cannot produce a batting crown.
Negro League statistics
Negro League data comes from Seamheads, following SABR's 2021 and 2024 recommendations on major-league status. Recovering these records is ongoing work, and totals can change as new sources are found. Missing values are unknown rather than zero.
Acknowledgements
The database exists because of a long line of researchers. Pete Palmer compiled much of the raw batting, pitching and fielding data. Sean Lahman built the first relational version and gave it away free from 1995. Sean Forman created Baseball-Reference and, with Lahman, launched the Baseball Databank. Ted Turocy automated the annual updates through the 2010s and linked the data to Retrosheet play-by-play. Tom Ruane's work at Retrosheet underpins much of the underlying quality, and Keith Woolner helped turn the early collection into a relational database.
Substantial ongoing contributions from Derek Adair, Mike Crain, Kevin Johnson, Rod Nelson, Tom Tango and Paul Wendt, with Hall of Fame research by Graham Womack and Bryan Walko — and many dozens more who have sent corrections over three decades.
Questions or feedback
Corrections, bugs and suggestions are welcome at userx7@gmail.com. Quoting the build line below helps — the app stores itself on your device so it keeps working offline, which means you may be looking at an older copy than the one currently published.
This app
Open source and free to use. The code is MIT licensed; the data keeps its own licence above. Nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by SABR, MLB, or any club.