Sports Reference Blog

Summer has come to a close, and so has our 2026 Sports Reference Internship program. This year, we had the privilege of welcoming six amazing interns across our Data, Engineering, and Marketing teams. Here's what they worked on over the summer and what they'll be up to in the fall!

Thomas McCabe, Engineering Intern, is a computer science student at Purdue University with a minor in history. He grew up in South Jersey and roots for the Philadelphia Eagles, Phillies, and Flyers.

This fall, he’ll begin his senior year at Purdue. His favorite project was helping to develop the backend and API functions for a new Sports Reference page.

Jack Rhoa, Engineering Intern, attends the University of Virginia, where he majors in computer science. A Maryland native whose favorite sport is baseball, Jack roots for the Virginia Cavaliers and the New York Yankees.

When he returns to school in Charlottesville this fall, Jack will help run theCourseForum, UVA's student-run, open-source course review site. His favorite project was building out the user-facing part of a new page for all Sports Reference sites, including implementing less intrusive human verification.

Jonah Botkin, Data Intern, graduated in May from the University of Michigan, where he studied information analysis. As a native Michigander, he roots for the Tigers, Lions, and Pistons, along with all of the Wolverines' teams.

His favorite project this summer was researching the American Basketball League’s history, which involved surfacing and cleaning box scores, locating arenas and attendance, identifying coaches, and finding buzzer-beaters. This fall, he will continue building the data skills he developed at Sports Reference as he pursues a career in sports media.

Pranav Uppalapati, Marketing Intern, is a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was born in Massachusetts but grew up in Cary, NC. He mainly follows baseball, but roots for all Boston sports teams (with split loyalty to the Bruins and Hurricanes).

His favorite project was writing a promotional article on 19th-century baseball nicknames, which is now hosted on MLBTradeRumors.com. Pranav is excited to take several strange humanities courses in the fall as he works toward finishing his degree in business administration and film studies.

Joseph Cote, Marketing Intern, is a rising senior at Michigan State University, where he studies marketing. He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois (just outside of Chicago) and is a huge fan of the Bears and Bulls. He’s also a proud Spartan fan (go Green!) Outside of rooting for his teams, Joseph enjoys playing Spikeball and pickleball with friends and family.

This fall, Joseph will work with Michigan State Athletics as a promotions intern, where he’ll help create gameday experiences through pizza giveaways, ball and T-shirt tosses, and other fun activities on MSU's fields and courts. His favorite project this summer was building out email campaigns around the launch of Sports Reference Search, helping introduce users to the new product and showcase how it can make exploring SR pages easier.

Gus Bailey, Data Intern, is a rising senior at Brown University studying applied math and economics. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and is an avid supporter of the Warriors, Valkyries, Giants, and Patriots, while also following soccer.

This fall, Gus will be starting his final year at Brown, working in data analytics with the women’s basketball team and pursuing a career in sports analytics. His favorite project this summer was building a database of NBA draft prospects and their biographical information using SQL queries combined with outside research.

We're very excited to announce that Baseball Reference now has coverage of the Women's Pro Baseball League! We'll have pitching and batting stats for both teams and players, updating daily, and pages for individual players and all teams. Additionally, we've reorganized our women's baseball coverage in one central place. There, you'll be able to find both WPBL coverage, as well as historic data coverage for all 12 seasons of the AAGPBL.

One of Sports Reference's core values is data democratization, and we're proud to make both current and historic stats available for all fans of the game! Head to the Women's Baseball section of Baseball Reference and begin exploring.

Last August we extended our NFL play-by-play coverage all the way back to 1978. It made our coverage easily the most comprehensive digitized PBP collection you could find anywhere in the public (and perhaps even private) domain. This year, thanks to our partnership with Aaron Schatz of FTN Fantasy and Jeremy Snyder of Quirky Research we are thrilled to add 1977 to the site. This means that once the 2026 NFL season kicks off in about a month we will have 50 seasons worth of NFL PBP! Read the rest of this entry

Big news! We're turning Sports-Reference.com into your home page for the players, teams, and sports you love. To start with, we've built a new search engine! On Sports-Reference.com, you can now search any player or team on any Reference site. Baseball, Men's and Women's Pro Basketball, Pro Football, Hockey, Soccer, College Football, and Men's and Women's College Basketball!

This brand new search engine also has a couple major upgrades. In addition to player names, you can now search for players by nickname. Terms like "GOAT," "Mamba," and "Lefty" will turn up corresponding players. Additionally, the search engine has a more forgiving "fuzzy search" capability, meaning that your spelling doesn't need to be perfect to get the results you need. Read the rest of this entry

The Sports Reference team has gained five new members across engineering, product, marketing, and operations.

Aidan Drake, Senior Test Engineer I, joined Sports Reference in August 2025. Aidan grew up in the Bay Area but now calls Seattle home. He closely follows the Mariners, is a fan of Tottenham Hotspur and loves to bike in his spare time.

Jack Labriola, Senior UX Researcher I, joined Sports Reference in March 2026. He comes to SR with a background in research across academia, banking, and financial software, and is now thrilled to spend his days thinking about sports. A New York native living in Atlanta (with a pit stop in Lubbock, TX in between), he roots for the Yankees, Nets, and Texas Tech.

Melody Chan, UX Designer I, joined Sports Reference with a mission to build intuitive, delightful experiences for sports fans. She currently lives in the Bay Area and grew up in Hong Kong. Outside of work, she loves experimenting with new baking recipes and traveling. She is a proud and supportive girlfriend of a Warriors fan. #DubNation

Chris Gehring, Senior Marketing Manager, joined Sports Reference in May of 2026. He previously worked in a variety of marketing roles at the Washington Wizards, RedPeg Marketing, and Troon Golf before a stint with Ceros, a creative software company. He's a proud Cleveland native and Louisville graduate that naturally now lives in Cincinnati. Follow him at @cdgehring.

Ella Chang, Executive Operations Coordinator, joined Sports Reference in June 2026 after interning with the marketing team in summer 2025. She lives outside of Philadelphia and is a proud Boston College alum. Ella cheers for Philly and BC sports teams (plus the Boston Fleet) and may be Edmundo Sosa’s number one fan.

Thanks to the work of Rick Stattler and the SABR Biographical Research Committee, a 'new' Major League baseball player has been discovered. John Henry Miller, known as Harry Miller, pitched on October 9, 1884 for Philadelphia of the National League. It was previously believed that this game was pitched by Cyclone Miller. It was a rough entry to the big leagues for Harry Miller, as he allowed 19 runs (10 earned) in the only major league game he'd ever pitch in.

Additionally, Justin McKinney discovered that the player previously listed as 'Spencer' on the 1872 Washington Nationals was actually Jacob Doyle. As Doyle was previously identified as playing in other games, this is not a new player to major league history, however.

Two months ago Basketball Reference added several dozen pre-official blocks, steals and turnovers totals. A bit more about some of these eye-opening discoveries was written by Tom Haberstroh for Yahoo! Sports. We're thrilled to announce that even more data has been unearthed, thanks to the efforts of researcher extraordinaire Tariq Jabbar. We now have blocks and steals totals for the 1971-72 and 1972-73 SuperSonics, as well as individual turnover totals for the 1971-72, 1972-73 and 1973-74 SuperSonics (which complements the individual turnovers we added for the 1974-75 SuperSonics two months ago). As a refresher, blocks and steals were not 'official' until 1973-74 and individual turnovers were not 'official' until 1977-78. But there's a lot of evidence that these numbers were routinely tracked (and often aggregated) much earlier.

The source of this information is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives, which can be searched on GenealogyBank.com.

Here's the 1971-72 clipping:

Here's the 1972-73 clipping:

And here's the 1973-74 clipping:

Of note, the 375 turnovers Hall-of-Famer Lenny Wilkens committed in 1971-72 are one of the highest single-season totals on record. His 182 steals that season make him the first player to average at least 18 PPG, 9 APG and 2 SPG in a season, a feat that wouldn't be matched until Magic Johnson a decade later. This update also gives a fascinating look at some additional numbers for Hall-of-Famer Spencer Haywood arguably at the height of his powers (arguably, because his rookie season in the ABA was clearly his most statistically dominant).

While we have integrated the individual totals, as well as the team/opponent totals for blocks and steals, we are not adding the team/opponent turnover totals at this time. They vary slightly from what Harvey Pollack recorded in his old guides that featured team/opponent turnover totals from before 1973-74. Given that Pollack covered the entire league for those statistics, his guide seems like a more authoritative source for apples-to-apples team/opponent turnover information. The individual information, on the other hand, is simply impossible to find elsewhere and this is the most authoritative source you will find. If anyone has any other 'pre-official' data that we don't currently have on the site, please let us know!

Pro Football Reference has added game-by-game fumble recoveries for NFL players from 1950-57 and also game-by-game fumble recoveries for AFL players for the entire 10-season run of the league from 1960-69. This update has also allowed us to generate season-level totals for AFL fumble recoveries from 1960-66, which were previously missing.

Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to our partnership with the Seamheads Negro League database, we have released an update to our Negro Leagues dataset. Our last update, in April of 2023, was covered in this blog post. Like last time around, this update includes thousands of incremental improvements. The most significant new data revolves around expanded fielding statistics and refinement around the presentation of team records. Additionally, lots of new biographical data has been added. Here's a rundown of some of the improvements Baseball Reference users will now see: Read the rest of this entry

Last September, we extended our coverage of NFL transactions back to 1994. Today, we're happy to announce that we have continued that work and now have coverage of NFL transactions back to 1988 on Pro Football Reference. We hope to continue extending this coverage further back in the future, though the 1987 season, with replacement players during the strike, looms as a challenge.

We would like to thank Pete Palmer for collecting this data for us.