USA Today's Devin Clancy interviews Baseball-Reference.com's Sean Forman:

Q: You can't possibly have been the only person to have this idea -- why has your site become such a popular resource over other sites with baseball stats?
A: I do believe that I was the first or second to have a baseball encyclopedia online. Total Baseball had a site briefly, but it was very hard to use. I have always been very, very focused on the user experience. I've made the pages as small as possible, so they load as fast as they can. Very little on any page is not actual data. I try to test the usability of the site with non-experts. I read extensively about usability. I always try to empathize with what

ESPN.com's Jim Caple has a nice profile of the internet's best site: Baseball-Reference.com.

The man we have to thank for Baseball-Reference.com -- and thus the person single-handedly responsible for the countless lost hours of office-worker production -- is math professor Sean Forman. He started working on the site in the mid-'90s when he was supposed to be working on his dissertation for a doctorate at the University of Iowa.
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The hard work also helped Forman reach the true standard of success in life. His hobby is now his career. After all those lonely hours and long years of research, the site has become lucrative enough through subscription and page sponsorships -- he says the page averages 40,000-50,000 hits per day -- that Forman recently left his teaching position at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia to make Baseball-Reference.com his full-time occupation.