When he was in high school, Hans van Slooten had a part-time job operating the control board at the Little Falls, Minn., radio station his father managed, mostly during network programming that required little technical expertise. So van Slooten sat in a radio booth night after night, paying close attention to Twins games and waiting to hit "play" on local commercials whenever Herb Carneal and John Gordon went to a between-innings break.
"I was a fan of Chili Davis," van Slooten recalls. "I sat there and listened every night, and I just really got into baseball."
Now he is immersed in baseball like few others. The game and its history lend themselves to statistical quantification that no other sport can match, and if those millions of numbers have an epicenter, these days it's in the small office of his St. Paul home. Or maybe his couch, if the Twins are on TV.
"People talk about their dream job — this is one of those things where you fall into something and I can't imagine wanting to do something else," van Slooten said. "It's not something I planned."
But this spring, it became his reality. In the Internet age, there is no more credible and ubiquitous website in baseball than Baseball-Reference.com, the go-to encyclopedia for fans, researchers and media members. And van Slooten, a 39-year-old native Minnesotan and Twins partial season-ticket holder, is now in charge of the site's day-to-day operations.
"Maintaining the site is a huge responsibility, because we have millions of users, people that rely on it on a daily basis," van Slooten said. "It's our biggest site, our best-known site, and it's the sport that I truly love."
To millions of fans, loving baseball means loving the numbers it generates, and that thirst for mathematical exploration has exploded in the Internet era, even among players themselves. "You don't play for statistics, by any means, but I think most players are aware of some of the numbers. It's pretty hard to miss them on the scoreboard," Twins manager Paul Molitor said. "We try to use them to help us understand how we can better succeed. … There are a lot of fans out there who really enjoy tracking them."
Van Slooten was one, joining the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and reading various analyses on the web, but he had no ambitions to turn that fondness into a career. After graduating high school in Little Falls, he went to college at Illinois, got a degree in computer science and took a job in Chicago, managing software developers.