About the MLB Team Employee Database

Background and Scope

The MLB Team Employee Database was created through the volunteer efforts of numerous SABR members, under the sponsorship and coordination of the Business of Baseball Committee.

The primary source for content in the database was annual MLB team media guides. Other sources included the Baseball Blue Book, The Sporting News, team yearbooks, and newspapers.

"MLB Employee" as used in the name of this database includes all team employees both front and back office (including ownership members available in the sources). Field managers and coaches, as well as players are not included. Scouts were included where available but may not be complete.

Additional Sources

A large portion of major league coaches was obtained from Retrosheet. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at "www.retrosheet.org".

Some data linking and person identification was done via the Chadwick Baseball Bureau Persons Register. This dataset is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License and is available at "https://github.com/chadwickbureau/register".

Examples of How the Database Can be Used

1. Provide biographical researchers a resource for identifying what positions an individual held.
2. Identify changes in organizational structures from year to year when researching specific franchises/teams (for example, when did teams begin staffing analytics positions?)
3. Compare franchises around various job types (for example, what are the relative sizes of medical personnel)

Data Limitations

In some years, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, teams did not include all their employees. Occasionally teams included only management and secretarial staff.

Team media guides also typically identify team personnel immediately prior to spring training. No attempt was made to identify changes in employees during the playing season.

Many persons were listed in various media guides with different names: their given names, shortened first names, initials, nicknames, or pre and post married names. Attempts were made to rationalize these occurrences with a single person identification.

There will be cases where the multiple variations of a person's name have not yet been reconciled, including misspellings of names in the media guide itself or during data entry.

Job Responsibilities

Because teams frequently used different titles for similar roles, the database implements the use of "tags" to help normalize roles across teams and from year to year.

For example, until recently the title "General Manager" was commonly used by teams to identify their head of baseball operations. In more recent years the role has often been referred to as "President Baseball Operations." The database has a tag for the person in this role tagging them as "Head of BB Ops".

Approximately 90 common tags have been identified to date to help identify common roles across teams and years. The tags are grouped for easy identification and use: Ownership, Key Positions, Executives, Broadcasters, Coaching, Scouting, Office, Stadium and On Field, and Other.

Furthermore, many roles listed in the media guides were qualified by the person's job level, such as Assistant, Coordinator, Vice President, and Director. These modifiers can also be used as tags.

Team Identifiers

In order to accommodate multiple team names of a franchise, standard franchise identifiers were assigned to each entry. This allows, for example, "Washington Senators" and "Minnesota Twins" to be retrieved as a single franchise in a search.

Searching and Sorting

The search engine allows the user to search by specific name, team, year, and role (called tags), as well as combinations of those items.

The search engine will attempt to find a person by their first name, full name, or nickname if any or all of these have been identified.

The following fields can be used to sort search results: First Name, Last Name, Team, and Year.

Additional Features

Any front office persons, who played in the majors or minors as defined by Baseball-Reference.com, will have the Baseball-Reference identifier (major league or minor league) as a hyperlink.

Beta Testing

The database has been migrated to SABR's environment and is being made available as a "beta" version. SABR members are encouraged to test the system and provide feedback in several categories:

1. Data entry errors.
2. Candidates for combining multiple persons who might be the same person.
3. Potential gaps in teams, years, or roles.
4. Tags that need to be added or modified to improve search results.
5. Person's Baseball-Reference identifiers that are missing or incorrect.

To submit a correction or update for anyone in the database, click here to fill out our feedback form.

Refer to current identifiers (person, role/tag, team, year) where applicable.

A team will monitor the feedback and develop a Change Log for periodic approved updates to the data and search engine.