At its homepage, baseball-reference.com is protected by Cloudflare. Typical approach to reach it reliably: Plain HTTP client. Difficulty is per-URL, so deep pages — profiles, listings, search — are usually harder.
A plain HTTP client reaches it — no managed anti-bot detected.
Typical access
Plain HTTP
Detected vendors
Evidence
Detection confidence: high · vendor present but served clean (passive edge, not an active challenge)
Homepage-level, datacenter-IP snapshot, June 13, 2026.
This is a homepage-level snapshot and can be inaccurate or out of date — anti-bot vendors update their models continuously, deep pages are usually more protected than the homepage, and difficulty is IP-sensitive: a site can read differently from a clean vs a flagged IP and even flip over time. Treat it as a directional signal, not a guarantee.
The homepage is the open front door. On a sports site the valuable pages behave differently — here's the plan to characterise baseball-reference.com before you build.
Article
variesOften metered/paywalled (subscribe wall), not a bot block.
Section / archive
usually openUsually open and crawlable.
Find a real deep URL cheaply from the site’s robots.txt and sitemap.xml, then run each through the anti-bot checker. This is an advisory based on the category and baseball-reference.com’s homepage result — detect the wall, never try to pass a login.