IF ONLY DESERT ISLANDS HAD INTERNET ACCESS:

The man behind the numbers: Former math professor creates statistics uber-site (John Donovan, February 6, 2007, Sports Illustrated)

If you're a baseball fan at all and you can find your way onto the Internet, you know Baseball-Reference.com. It's the one-stop shop for baseball statistics, an ever-growing repository of data that is truly staggering in depth and breadth. Need the lineup for the '69 Orioles -- on Aug. 3, 1969? It's there. Need to know how Brooks Robinson did that day? It's on the same page. Want to know how your favorite first baseman stacks up against others? Easy. Who was the American League Gold Glove winner at catcher in 1972? Piece of cake. And I could go on and on. Baseball-Reference.com certainly does.

The site is the 7-year-old baby of Sean Forman, a mathematician, computer programmer, baseball fan, one-time college professor and self-professed stats geek. Forman, 35, launched the site on Feb. 1, 2000, and has built it into a powerhouse in the baseball information world. It has grown to be so successful that Forman, a catcher on his high school team in Iowa, left his job as an assistant professor of mathematics at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia to run B-R fulltime.

I talked to him about baseball, statistics, baseball statistics and his site earlier this week.