Ernest John Lanigan was an American sportswriter and historian on the subject of baseball. He was considered the premier baseball statistician and historian of his day. He was a pioneer at gathering information about baseball statistics and about the players themselves, and was the author of the first encyclopedia of the subject.

In addition to having parents who were both writers and editors (George Thomas Lanigan and Bertha Spink Lanigan ), Lanigan was the nephew, on his mother's side, of The Sporting News founders Al Spink and Charles Spink, and one of five men in his family, including J. G. Taylor Spink and C.C. Johnson Spink, to gain acclaim as a newspaperman.

Shortly after The Sporting News was launched in the mid-1880s, 15-year-old Lanigan went to work for his uncles. He served three years at the paper, then made a career change and became a bank clerk for the next eight years. His knowledge of baseball and writing, and his passion for numbers, accrued from those two jobs, would serve him well in the future. However, he also came down with a lung infection, possibly pneumonia, which affected his health for the remainder of his long life.

During a two-year convalescence in the Adirondack Mountains, he continued his baseball stat gathering for The Sporting News, as he had during his banking career, and began inventing new statistics. The best known of these were the RBIs and the CS, which he researched and catalogued, and which were eventually adopted as official major league statistics. He also developed a more comprehensive list of Winning Pitcher and Losing Pitcher compilations.

Over the course of his career he also worked for the New York Press as sports editor until 1911, and was the official scorer for some of the early World Series; as sports editor for the Cleveland Leader.

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