Sean Holtz is living proof that baseball enthusiasts make changes, too.
The former Miami-Dade Police Department sergeant traded his stripes for a computer 25 years ago and never looked back. He also doubled his maximum police salary to $100,000.
Now, instead of patrolling the streets of Liberty City, he works six hours a day as a solo exhibitor on the popular online site Baseball-Almanac. com.
Holtz, 56, updates between 3,000 and 5,000 pages a day, but it’s necessarily a one-man show, aided only by php programmer Shirley Studebaker and an independent advertising agency, which he never meets.
“I don’t have a day off,” he said in an exclusive interview. “There are games each and every day of the season, players replace teams, older players die and there are loose businesses in baseball. I update the pages every single day.
“I wake up before four in the morning. In fact, my coffee maker rings at 3:30 p. m. sharp. I watch the local news for an hour with my coffee, walk into my office, sit down, and start my day. I play all the games, which can be forty-five minutes in a short day, 90 minutes if it’s 15.
“Then I make emails, updates, all the pages that have been affected, and the little unique elements about the data that I receive.
“I take breaks, walk my dog (a Labrador retriever named Grace) and avoid around 10:30 a. m. m. Lunch at 11 a. m. And I faint during lunch. It’s my escape from my home office.
A native of West Palm Beach, Fla. , who once supported the Atlanta Braves because they practiced there every spring, Holtz switched his allegiance to the Miami Marlins after the expansion team opened in 1993.
“When Major League Baseball was contemplating putting a team in South Florida, I was running as a safety for a secret meeting they were having in Miami,” he said. “They had uniformed patrols to protect the workplace and I was assigned that task. “
Baseball Almanac, Inc. began as an arduous labor of love, according to its founder.
“I’ve been a tech-savvy kid,” Holtz explained. “I enjoyed the generation and video games. I became a cop right out of high school because Miami-Dade police were recruiting, but I never stopped playing with computers.
That fascination turned into a private assignment called The National Pastime, which earned Holtz a $500 savings bonus from AT’s Pages service.
“I found that a lot of other people were saving knowledge from baseball statistics,” he said, “and the logic of the knowledge base worked for me. When the Marlins started, I started recording their knowledge and putting it into CompuServe. It was called the Autograph Collectors Club and evolved from there.
Have you ever done it? This pastime has grown into a giant corporation that houses more than 500,000 pages of baseball history. Teams, players, and enthusiasts all contribute.
“I get all kinds of questions,” said Holtz, who receives more than 60 baseball-related emails a day. “I did a lot of work with the groups to get the uniform numbers online. I keep a separate list of retired numbers.
Holtz has an extensive library of studies that includes more than 10,000 books and printouts of each and every score published through The Sporting News since the advent of the American League in 1901.
“I went through all my old Baseball Digest problems and generated a list of all the other people who made the impression on their front pages. I get books from publishers all the time, but I don’t have a list of books in progress. Other people have asked me if I can list the contents of my study library, but I don’t need to write a list of 10,000 books.
“I have so many projects that I have to paint next. “
Surrounded by baseball memorabilia, Sean Holtz directs Baseball-Almanac. com from his home in Array. [ ] Greenville, South Carolina.
Tania Esberg, his friend since 2014, and his ex-wife have tolerated their two passions: baseball and computing.
“I’m an empty kid,” said Holtz, who moved from Miami to Greenville three years ago after an exhaustive search that took him to 12 other cities. “My daughter is in Miami, I’m in Greenville. Although I go to the beach in Miami, I also love the mountains. Now I can grab coffee at my workplace in the morning and be in five other states by lunchtime.
Holtz returns to Florida every year for spring training, but he’s never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame or an All-Star Game. There just isn’t enough time in your schedule.
“I go to any game, anytime, anywhere,” the paint addict said. “I move on to spring education in Florida, but I don’t travel as much as I’d like for baseball. It’s hard for me to travel during baseball season. I have a computer but it’s easier to work from my home office.
Fresh off a two-week vacation in Hawaii, his first, Holtz shows up for a minor league game.
“We have a team called Greenville Drive that plays in a stadium that looks like Little Fenway,” he said. “The stadium is a mirrored symbol of Fenway Park, designed that way so that when a player is called up, he doesn’t have to make a lot of adjustments. “
Holtz, on the other hand, is making adjustments, aided by the advice he gets from his site’s users.
“I enjoy them,” he says of his readers. I love you. A guy named Mike discovered my site while he was reading an ebook and found out that he had indexed the wrong year for the Kansas City Athletics spring education site when he moved from one position to another. He included a clever newspaper article to back up his claims, and I promptly took stock.
“Every time I reply to my emails, I end them all the same way: with a postscript that says, “If you see anything that might affect this site, let me know. »
Surprisingly, Baseball-Almanac. com is free. And it’s not full of ads.
“I did everything I could to make money, but without you having to face trash all over the place,” said the affable and eloquent former Floridian. “When I replaced the advertising companies, I tried to make the site so boring that other people would hate it. “
Holtz uses FreeStar, the same advertising company Baseball-Reference. com. Banner classifieds are your way of generating revenue.
He learned about the company while browsing the Baseball-Reference site, which he says is more of a friendly rival than a competitor.
“They concentrate on the statistics and I concentrate on the stories, the statistics,” he explained. “It’s a statistics site and I’m a history site. This is truly an amazing site in terms of baseball statistics. I collect exclusive data and I’m all my own in baseball history.
For example, Holtz helps keep track of players who hit home runs on both sides of the plate in the same game. When Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz did it earlier this month, one such tour took place inside the park. He also stole a base in that game.
According to baseball goaltender Almanac, “He’s the sixth man to do all this with an inside-the-park home run, the seventeenth to borrow a base in the game, but it’s just the right time to do it all: at home. Run to left, right homer, inside the park home run and base fly. Maury Wills did it for the Dodgers against the Mets in 1962 at the Polo Grounds.
A member of the Society for American Baseball Research [SABR], Holtz provides study articles to baseball writers, authors, members of the media, players, managers, and executives. It offers pages on players, managers, and referees; Top 1000 hits, home runs, hitters and pitcher lists; uniform numbers; and much more.
As filmmaker Woody Allen would say, it’s everything you wanted to know about baseball but were afraid to ask.
The number one source of data for the Baseball Almanac is Major League Baseball, which provides you with an XML knowledge source. “Sometimes MLB gets it and someone sends me a birth certificate to show it,” he said. I get a lot of biographical data, information about the players, their wives and relatives.
He also enjoys immense respect both in and out of the game.