But the star that a certain breed of baseball fan has been missing this first month of the season has been Baseball-Reference.com, on the shelf with server troubles. For the stat-hungry fan -- and baseball breeds stat-hungry fans like wrestling breeds bloodthirsty ones -- Sean Forman's ludicrously informative, lightning-fast site, all of a year old, has already become as much a part of the season as sunshine, natural grass and the infield fly rule.

"Essentially we had a plain old $30 Web hosting account [with Communitech.net] and I guess I was using too many resources for their taste and they just kinda shut me down without any warning," says Forman, 29, who teaches applied mathematics at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "So since that we've convinced them to at least put a note up on the site, and I can now read my e-mail again."

Baseball-Reference, which has been on the D.L. since April 9, is a complete baseball encyclopedia, with stats through the end of 2000 for every player who's ever appeared in the major leagues, along with league and franchise leaders, standings, attendance figures, player comparisons, postseason results, Hall of Fame evaluations and on and on. And it doesn't just cover the current (National and American) or modern (since 1901) major leagues either. Got a favorite player from the 19th century Detroit Wolverines, Kansas City Cowboys or St. Paul Apostles? Wondering how the Brooklyn Tip-Tops did in the Federal League in 1914? Look it up on Baseball-Reference, which also has features like a travel guide -- plug in your ZIP code and find out what major or minor league teams or other baseball-related sites are nearby.

Forman hopes to have the site back up by the beginning of the week on a dedicated server, which he estimates will cost between $200 and $300 a month.

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His note on the site says, "In the first week of April, Baseball-Reference served 1.07 million files (134k per day) and a total of 650k in individual pages (85k of these are scripts that require a trip to the database), while servicing 42,000 distinct hosts. The 11.3 GB of data transferred is also a very high total." It goes on to gently ask for donations, which can be made through PayPal.com or Amazon.com.

"That's gone pretty well, actually," Forman says. "I think I'll be able to cover probably the first five or six months just from that."

And they say people won't pay for content on the Web. Well, maybe they won't for big-name, big-money outfits -- but for a true labor of love they'll be happy to fork over the cash. Forman says he began asking for donations in October or November. "There's a couple people who have sent considerable amounts of money. One guy sent like 500 bucks, so that was pretty neat. I wasn't expecting anything like that."

On March 26, Baseball-Reference was featured in Sports Illustrated. Forman estimates his hits went up about 50 to 60 percent because of that exposure, and that probably sealed the deal with his Web host, though he says a bump in traffic was coming with the start of the season anyway. "I'm guessing [Sports Illustrated] was the cause," he says. "You don't think of the Sports Illustrated curse in that way, but yeah, I guess you could say that's what happened."

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