SR and Data Use

In addition to the discussion below, please see our Site Terms of Use specifically clause 5 for permitted uses of our data.

We provide an excerpt here for the most relevant part, but you are responsible for understanding the entirety of the Site Terms.

...except as expressly permitted by this Agreement, in connection with the use of the Site, you may not:

  • ....
  • sell, rent, lease, transfer, provide, or otherwise assign to any third party any rights to the Site; or
  • ...
  • copy, modify, erase, or damage any information contained on computer servers used or controlled by SRL or any third party; or
  • use the Site to violate any legal right of any third party, including any publicity or privacy right, copyright, or other intellectual property right, or to take any action that is harassing, libelous, defamatory, abusive, tortious, threatening, harmful, or otherwise objectionable; or
  • ...
  • impersonate or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or entity; or
  • without our express written permission, use any automated means to access or use the Site, including scripts, bots, scrapers, data miners, or similar software, in a manner that adversely impacts site performance or access; or
  • use any material or Content from the Site, including without limitation any statistics or data, (i) to create any database, archive, or other data store that competes with or constitutes a material substitute for the services or data stores offered on the Site or by the Site's Data Providers or (ii) to provide any service that competes with or constitutes a material substitute for the services or data stores offered on the Site or by the Site's Data Providers; or
  • copy or use any material or Content from the Site, including without limitation any statistics, data, text, graphics, or images, for purposes of training, fine-tuning, prompting, or instructing artificial intelligence models or technologies in any manner, including without limitation for purposes of (i) generating answers, text, scores, statistics, notes, graphics, images, or any other output; or (ii) supporting machine learning methods used to predict, classify, label, or score inputs into the models; or
  • ....

This means that you should not create websites or tools based on data you scrape from Sports Reference or any of our sites or use our data to train generative artificial intelligence models without our permission.

We have seen an uptick in requests from students, academics and businesses looking to receive custom datasets from our sites, in some cases for free and in some cases for a small fee.

These requests occur multiple times a week and sometimes multiple times per day. These requests take a considerable amount of time to negotiate, specify and then produce. Generally we've only been asking for coverage of our time and have attempted to fulfill academic requests on generous terms. However, the rate of requests has forced us to reevaluate this stance.

There are a couple of additional mitigating factors. For some of our datasets, our licenses completely preclude any redistribution of the data. And, in some cases, we cannot even give you explicit permission to reuse en masse what you find on the site. Additionally, we need to block any aggressive spidering of the site to maintain site performance for non-bot traffic (i.e. actual people using the site).

As an aside, copyright law is clear that facts cannot be copyrighted, so you are free to reuse facts found on this site in accordance with copyright laws.

Moving forward, our data request policy is as follows:

We will not fulfill any requests for data for custom downloads, unless you are prepared to pay a minimum of $1,000 for any such request.

We realize this will be insurmountable for any student requests. However, I would point out that learning how to accumulate data is often a more valuable skill than actually analyzing the data, so we encourage you as a student or professional to learn how. We also realize that your request may not take that long by itself, but when coupled with everyone else's requests it becomes a significant expense for us. There are also many excellent, free data sources listed below.

If you are willing to meet our minimum fee, please contact us via our Feedback Form.

Web Scraping

Please see bot traffic page for information on how we limit and may at times block bot traffic and what our expectations are for responsible bot use.

Paid Data Sources

Here are some additional sources for data that may be able to help you as well:

If you are interested in obtaining a large amount of data, please contact one or more of the following companies or organizations. Please tell them that we forwarded you to them.

NatStat, NatStat has a huge amount of data for very little money.

Baseball Info Solutions.

Sports Direct, Inc a Gracenote subsidiary.

Spotrac for contract data.

Opta for advanced soccer data.

Free Data Sources

Baseball Databank. Unsupported free dataset for major league baseball full-season stats.

RetroSheet.org. RetroSheet has free downloadable files that allow you to create mlb play-by-play accounts of the games. They also have gamelogs for each team for every season in mlb history. You may be able to find help with the files on the RetroList yahoo group.

Hockey Summary Project. Game level accounts of hockey seasons.

Please do not attempt to aggressively spider data from our web sites, as spidering violates the terms and conditions that govern your use of our web sites: Site Terms of Use

If we notice excessive activity from a particular IP address we will be forced to take appropriate measures, which will include, but not be limited to, blocking that IP address. We thank you in advance for respecting our terms of use.