Baseball Stats Galore - Join SABR On May 16 For Free Talk

Van Slooten will provide a brief history of the website, reveal some of the lesser known corners of the site and provide a tutorial on the site’s play indexes. He will also answer questions and run any play index queries requested by the audience.

While some may consider spending their day working with baseball stats a dream job, van Slooten told me recently with a laugh, “It’s not nearly as glamorous as it sounds.” The main office is in Philadelphia so he works normal business hours (“on east coast time”) from his home in St. Paul. A typical day may include fixing bugs on the site or developing new features. “I spent a lot of time earlier getting ready for the new season,” said van Slooten, who has a degree in computer science.

Another big responsibility is responding to daily inquiries – “A lot of the historical questions get forwarded onto Retrosheet but I also get emails from former minor leaguers saying, ‘Hey, you spelled my name wrong.’ And I can’t just take their word for it, I have to verify that they are who they say they are before I can correct it.”

With the sheer amount of information on the site, it’s easy to get lost in a mountain of data. “Sometimes I forget everything we have on the site,” van Slooten says. “It’s fun to search for random stuff like a Hall of Famer’s worst game or guys who played one major league game.” The site is 15 years old so it has its bugs and the work is ongoing – continuing projects include speeding up the site’s loading time and improving the mobile capabilities.

So if you’ve ever wondered how many complete games Old Hoss Radbourn had in 1884 (73 – take that, Bert Blyleven), join us for an evening of stats, baseball history and random information that every baseball fan needs filling their brain on a daily basis.

An Evening with Hans van Slooten

Monday, May 16, 2016

7 pm

Roseville Library

2180 Hamline Avenue, Roseville, 55113

Hamline Avenue and County Road B

This event is free and no RSVP is required.