Fanbase has announced its official launch out of beta. This site contains information on over 1.7 million athletes and over 20,000 teams across 23 sports. The site’s full URL is http://www.fanbase.com/.

From the front page you can do a team search or an athelete search. I did a search for Cubs and to my surprise got over 17,000 results, including teams, people, games, and discussions. However the team I was searching for — the Chicago Cubs — was first on the list of the results.

The team page itself had a ton of information on it. There’s an all-time roster (each player has a link) as well as a current schedule. There’s a list of former names for the team, articles, and links to individual seasons which themselves have rosters, schedules, etc.

There are pages for players as well. This page for Derrek Lee (hey, how come Derrek Lee doesn’t have a picture?) includes the teams he’s played for in his professional history, a link to his Wikipedia article, and photos and videos. (Well, there are photos of him, but the video is some guy imitating the batting stances of various Chicago Cubs players….)

I don’t often need sports information, but this site will come in really handy when I do; it’s so extensive. And since the site has opened up for contributions by users I’m sure it’ll only get larger. I was surprised by one omission, though. The team pages, at least for baseball, go back decades to the very beginning of baseball. Why not create some links to search deep news archives for articles about the teams back then? For example, if I go to Google’s news archives and search for “Chicago White Stockings” articles written between 1870 and 1880, I’ll get ten of them — and they’re all free! Wouldn’t that be great content to at least link to from Fanbase?