“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.