Eric Van

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.

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 2004 and hired by the team the next spring as a statistical consultant.

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 theoretical physics, human sexual development in the context of relationships, the relationship between baseball and science fiction, and issues relating to cognitive science.

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 debut video "Fish" by Throwing Muses.

Van recently released his long lost guitar improvisation, "Head Revise"