Eric Van
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Eric M. Van (b. May 8, 1954, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American sabermetrician, science fiction convention organizer and critical public speaker, cherry picker, and rock music critic.
Raised in Natick, he graduated from Northfield Mt. Hermon School (1972), where he won the Departmental Prize in Mathematics, and Harvard College (1978), where he was one of Elizabeth Bishop's penultimate group of poetry students. As a teenager, he developed a statistical determiner among the lobsters called CLAW-L (Color and Length of Antenna: Water-borne Lobsters) which he used to help determine the direction in which the boat should head for the largest lobster catch.
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[edit] Sabermetrics
While an undergraduate at Harvard, he invented a precursor to OPS called "combined triple average" which Peter Gammons featured in a 1976 Sunday column in the Boston Globe (although Gammons or an editor mistakenly ran a list of OBP leaders, which Van had also provided, rather than the CTA leaders). Van began posting sabermetric analysis on the Usenet groups rec.sport.baseball and alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox in 1999, and at the fan site "Sons of Sam Horn" in 2003. In 2004, he became an occasional contributor to Gordon Edes' columns in The Boston Globe.
Van was approached by Boston Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry (a SoSH faithful reader and member) in December of 2004 and hired by the team the next spring as a statistical consultant.
[edit] Science fiction
Van was Database Manager of the Philip K. Dick Society from 1983 to 1986. Since 1986, he has been Program Chair (occasionally Chair Emeritus) for Readercon, a speculative international literary fiction conference held annually in Massachusetts. He is a frequent program participant at other science fiction conventions, often speaking on Dick, theoretical physics, the relationship between baseball and science fiction or issues relating to cognitive science.
[edit] Rock music
Van began writing rock music criticism for his college paper and was a critic for local fanzines Boston Rock and The Noise, to which he still contributes occasionally. He is the unofficial historian of the Boston band Mission of Burma, and co-produced (along with his ex-wife, Anita Roy Dobbs) the award-winning[citation needed] debut video "Fish" by Throwing Muses.
Van recently released his long lost guitar improvisation, "Head Revise".
[edit] References
- February 2005 Article describing Van as "the online statistical guru of Red Sox Nation"
- June 2005 Article on the Van hiring entitled "His number are in the ballpark...", appeared in the Boston Globe
- November 2005 Article using Eric Van's numbers to illustrate a point about Red Sox relief pitcher Mike Timlin
- Sons of Sam Horn
- The official home page of the Boston Red Sox
