If only every club and province had a numbers man like Scott Cameron.
Actually, that description does not nearly do justice to the amount of work he has done for the Union Cricket Club and the North Otago Cricket Association.
He's a researcher, statistician, historian and storyteller rolled into one.
Cameron (35) has devoted thousands of hours to the thankless task of delving into old scorebooks, records and newspaper articles to compile an extraordinary amount of information on the history of his club and province.
For two websites (www.unioncc.co.nz and www.noca.co.nz), he has provided a mind-bogglingly detailed list of game and player records.
You can find the scorecard for Union v Albion in March 1930 - James Robertson scored an unbeaten ton and Union won by an innings - or see just how many runs (5829 and counting) the ageless Duncan Drew has scored for the club.
''I can't guarantee I've got every game but I'd say I've got 99.9%,'' Cameron said.
''There are more than 2700 games on our website, of which probably 1200 have full scorecards. Some of them have also got the match reports.
''Records are also itemised by player. So you can click on Robert Coates, say, and see his career record or his statistics season by season.''
At Union's centenary, New Zealand cricket historian Don Neely proclaimed it the most detailed cricket club website in the country.
This magnificent obsession started when Cameron, son of Union and North Otago stalwart Peter and brother of long-serving batsman Glynn, bought a computer magazine in 1996.
It came packaged with a cricket statistics programme designed by a boffin in England.
So, Cameron used it to upload statistics from that summer of cricket at King George Park.
The project expanded after a conversation with Bob Pile, then Union's oldest member.
''I thought it would be nice to go back and find some records from when Bob started. Another guy, Jim Rowell, was a scorer and had masses and masses of scorebooks. It was a matter of just going through those and chucking them into the computer programme.
''After that, I just spent a lot of time at the museum, going through papers to find each season. I had a camera and it was just click, click, click.
''It was a massively time-consuming job.''
Cameron, an IT network engineer at the Waitaki District Council, initially compiled Union statistics from 1949-50 before going all the way back to 1909, when the club was founded.
Then came the representative side.
Delving back into the archives, and also using the New Zealand Cricket Almanack, Cameron did for North Otago cricket what he had done for his club.
His representative records go all the way back to the first recognised North Otago game, in 1895. He has full scorecards and match reports for most games, and also individual player records.
The beauty of the research is that local cricketers can easily find out when a milestone is near or has been reached.
The perfect example came last summer when North Otago posted 416 against Mid Canterbury. Cameron's research indicated that was a record for the province and Francois Mostert had joined an exclusive club by scoring a century and taking five wickets.
''He was walking off and I was able to tell him he was only the second North Otago player ever to do that. And cricketers love their stats.''
Cameron was ''never a great cricketer'' but was a regular senior reserve player and has been senior manager for eight seasons.
