Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

This fight is for everything.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Republicans don’t trust women.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

No one could have predicted…

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Open Thread: Nate Silver Flees Back to Baseball

Open Thread: Nate Silver Flees Back to Baseball

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Where people respect numbers over feelings, mostly. From the NYTImes:

Nate Silver, the statistician who attained national fame for his accurate projections about the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is parting ways with The New York Times and moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, according to ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans.

At ESPN, Mr. Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to “Olbermann,” the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney…

Before creating statistical models for elections, Mr. Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future. For a time he was a managing partner of Baseball Prospectus. At public events recently, he has expressed interest in covering sports more frequently, so the ESPN deal is a logical next step….

The relationship between The Times and Mr. Silver was mutually beneficial. The news organization gained Web traffic and prestige by hosting his work, and he received a salary, a wider audience and editorial support. But he also occasionally hinted in interviews and public appearances that the relationship was tense at times.

Where I first heard:

Reader Interactions

114Comments

  1. 1.

    raven

    Yea, Billmon< that's the other guy I never heard of besides "Sully" and the TNC dude people were all hot and bothered about.

  6. 6.

    lamh36

    Wow, does Salon usually troll this hard? I refuse to link it to give ‘em the click views. I understand some on the left did not like the speech, but this article was straight up trolling. And no, it’s not okay cause this guy is Black.

    @AngryBlackLady 18s
    “Some of us have an Inner Child. Others have an Inner Nigger. Is Holder the prez’s conscience? Or his Inner Nigger?” @Salon published that.
    ‏@AngryBlackLady 1m
    When I said publish more voices of color, this wasn’t what I had in mind, @Salon.
    ‏@elonjames 1m
    Wow. And @Salon–do you guys not have editors? What editor in their right mind sees “Inner Nigger” and thinks “Publish this ASAP

  7. 7.

    PeakVT

    I can imagine how Silver might get bored between elections. OTOH, there’s always some sport in season.

  8. 8.

    Donut

    Good for him. It seemed pretty obvious that his throw-downs with Tiger Beat on the Potomac were not winning him any friends in the C-suite at the Times company.

    That said, I kinda came to appreciate Sam Wang’s approach to statistical analysis in the last round a little more than Silver’s. And Silver’s most latest piece on the early landscape of the Senate races was a little disappointing. There was a lot more tea-leaf reading than number crunching involved in that, and that just is not Silver’s strength.

  12. 12.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    There’s some truth to;

    Cant see why @fivethirtyeight would wanna cover boring game played by egotistical idiots – so I understand why he wants 2 go back 2 baseball

  13. 13.

    moonbat

    I vote for Wang. He crunched his numbers with much less emoting than Silver this last time round. And let’s face it, when you start doing political commentary instead of just the facts, ma’am, you are playing the Villagers’ game.

  14. 14.

    lamh36

    @raven: I don’t much care if you don’t understand, but… I posted it in the last thread, but I actually wanted to post it here. I would have deleted the one from the last thread, but as I”m sure you know, there is a limited time to edit a comment.

    In fact AL, or whoever if ya can delete the comment from the last thanks.

  16. 16.

    NotMax

    Well, Balloon Juice never updated the URL in the blogroll for 538 to point to the NYT incarnation, so don’t expect it to ever lead to the new digs.

  17. 17.

    Da;vid Koch

    The most interesting part in the story is the last sentence:

    But he also occasionally hinted in interviews and public appearances that the relationship was tense at times.

    Sounds like the Times tried to pressure him over his election outcome numbers.

  18. 18.

    Narcissus

    Think about the fact that sports journalism has a higher standard of rigor than political journalism

  19. 19.

    Heliopause

    moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN

    I don’t understand. There is no Bayesian regression that turns Tim Tebow into a good quarterback as far as I am aware, which means that Silver would have no conceivable role at ESPN.

  21. 21.

    NotMax

    @David Koch

    That’s quite a leap.

    “Tense” could refer to most anything – even something as trivial as a protracted dispute over a better parking space.

  23. 23.

    burnspbesq

    @Da;vid Koch:

    Sounds like the Times tried to pressure him over his election outcome numbers.

    Before Carl Lewis broke his record, we used to call leaps like that “Beamon-esqe.”

  24. 24.

    Jewish Steel

    @raven: I had to look that up!

    @SIA: Yeah, me too. Silver’s numbers are interesting. His punditizing left something to be desired. Sam, by contrast, was, like you say, cool and frosty.

  28. 28.

    mai naem

    Grover Norquist is one with Connie Mack on Bill Maher. Ugh. Is there anybody more deserving of a baseball rammed up his ass than Grover Norquist? Sorry for the visual but I detest this asshole.

  31. 31.

    David Koch

    In 1970 the NY Times staff consisted of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Anthony Lewis, Sy Hersh, Sidney Shamberg, Hedrick Smith, and Scotty Reston.

    Today it’s Friedman, Dowd, Brooks, Keller, Nocera, and a constant drum beat for wars.

    Nate and KThug were they only reasons to subscribe. How far they’ve fallen.

  32. 32.

    raven

    @Steeplejack: What do you think of this?

    Jefferson was clear about the mission at hand and, with his typical attention to detail, gave instructions covering everything from where the expedition should begin and end, to what equipment and supplies they should have, to how they should take notes and how to handle the natives and even how to organize the leadership of the expedition in the event that the original leaders perished on the journey

  39. 39.

    furlyfly

    Nate got all the attention but Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium has a model that tends to be even more accurate. His site was my go to site all through the 2012 election cycle. Minimal drama and he had the electing pegged all the way! No drama, just a solid Obama win prediction. Presented in a very informative way.

  40. 40.

    JWL

    Could well be E$PN is slicing Mr. Silver a healthy piece of pie, paycheck-wise.

    That’s just a guess.

    Michael Caine was once asked about his performance in Jaws (3?), a truly rotten movie, to which he replied (paraphrase), “No, I haven’t. But I live in the house it paid for”.

  44. 44.

    Jewish Steel

    @raven: I did! I saw it when it came out too but not since. I think a lot of it went over my head at the time.

    @Steeplejack: My internal dialogue is strafed with commas.

  45. 45.

    Gin & Tonic

    @burnspbesq: Officially it was Mike Powell who broke the record. Lewis’ jump was wind-aided. (I’m assuming you’re talking about the 1991 world Championships.)

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Used to use those as ashtrays. :)

    Junked punch cards.

    They fit perfectly in a breast pocket and were ultra-convenient to use as scratch paper.

    @efgoldman

    Had the privilege (?) of using what was one of perhaps three machines in existence in the very early 80s, made by Sony, which used a huge naked floppy disc on a platter (can’t recall whether it was 48-inch or 60-inch, but it was freakin’ big). Made for the extremely primitive use of storing and transmitting very, very limited bits of video.

    Also got to use one of the last of Bell’s (AT&T) electronic blackboards for a project. The AT&T techs who watched my demonstration literally slapped their foreheads, along with a “No one has ever thought of using it in that manner before” gape.

  47. 47.

    MattF

    I think the last paragraph of the quote probably tells the story– it was mutually beneficial, and now it’s time to move on. I’d guess Mark Blumenthal is high on the list of possible successors.

  48. 48.

    David Koch

    @NotMax: My goodness. After winning the Pulitzer and risking his life covering six wars Sidney Shamberg got fired for criticizing a well heeled manhattan real estate development.

    They hounded Bill Clinton with manufactured lies on whitewater.

    They buried the warantless-wiretaps story because they knew his impeachable acts would cost shrub the election.

    They refused to apologize and fire Judith Miller for filing grievous false stories on WMDs.

    It’s not a leap at all to suspect them of pressuring Nate to cook the books given their history of cooking stories.

  49. 49.

    Steeplejack

    @raven:

    The commas before the “to” clauses are grammatically incorrect but rhetorically necessary (for mental or “breathing” pauses) to break up the inelegant sentence. Perhaps better would be:

    [.  .  .] gave instructions on where the expedition should begin and end, what equipment and supplies they should have, how they should take notes and handle the natives and even how to organize the leadership of the expedition in the event that the original leaders perished on the journey

    That’s tighter, reads more clearly and still gets across the idea that Jefferson was a micromanaging fussbudget.

  53. 53.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Gin & Tonic: Interestingly, next year some time Mike Powell will have held the long jump record as long as Bob Beamon held it. His mark from 1991 still stands.

  55. 55.

    mclaren

    Newt Gingrich is the obvious candidate to replace Nate Silver. He can get us kick-started on that moonbase, and after we discover all that oil on the moon, it’ll solve our other problems too.

  57. 57.

    eemom

    @Jewish Steel:

    Silver’s numbers are interesting. His punditizing left a whole fuckload to be desired.

    Fixetated.

    I, too, approve of the commas. Also too.

  58. 58.

    NotMax

    @David Koch

    Of course the Old Gray Lady is not without blemishes, some quite disfiguring or even irredeemable. That doesn’t mean such is automatically so in every single case.

    The difference, obviously, being that your assumption about Silver is based on precisely zero presented evidence whatsoever, now or at any time in the interim between the campaigns/election and today.

    That’s what makes it an Evel Knievel over Snake Canyon scale leap.

  59. 59.

    Susan

    Nate probably did a bunch of number crunching and discovered that the NYTimes is on its way out. So, he found a new gig,

    I have great admiration for the brilliant Billmon, and, like many others, I continue to miss the superb, beautifully written analysis he shared with the “patrons” of his Whiskey Bar. To his great disappointment, the liberal blogosphere couldn’t stop the Iraq War, so he closed the bar and largely went away.

    I keep hoping that one day he will re-open it. Until then, I stay on the lookout for Billmon Spottings.

  60. 60.

    Donald G

    Surely in the interest of “balance”, since Nate was accurate for two presidential elections, the Times will feel compelled to give the political statistician gig to Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls.

    Dean will then fail his way upward to NBC, where he will replace Ricky Gervai…er, I mean Chuck Todd as Todd makes his way over to Fox.

  61. 61.

    eemom

    IIRC Omnes is a comma collector.

    OMNES SHOULD SHOW.

    /weird occasional late night stalker troll whose nym I can’t remember.

  67. 67.

    Jewish Steel

    @Steeplejack: Ha! Well I'm very flattered!

    I wonder if it's because of my musical training. Trying to notate the sound as much as write the words, you dig?

    ♫ So tonight I'm gonna comma like it's 1699 ♫

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack

    @Jewish Steel:

    I dig. I feel the same way about writing. Bad punctuation is like playing a guitar with one string slightly out of tune. You can still hear the song, but . . . ugh.

  73. 73.

    Kropadope

    @Mike in NC: His whole polling operation will be destroyed from this. How will he ever adjust his model now that he can’t do Nate+(R+5)=win!!!

  76. 76.

    mai naem

    Why did the Floriduh GOP think that Connie Mack was going to win against Bill Nelson? Just watched him on Bill Maher. Total lightweight bordering on buffoon. I know he’s got the name going for him but jayzus.

  77. 77.

    fuckwit

    Sam Wang could do the job. His numbers were just as solid as Nate Silver’s.

    However, I must say I AM SCARED SHITLESS of what Nate just posted, that the Senate is likely to flip to the Rethugs.

    HORRIBLE! WORST FUCKING NEWS THIS WEEK.

    Maybe that’s why he decided to quit. He’s probably looked at all the numbers, and he’s too depressed to continue.

    So, in a few years, we get to look forward to a House AND a Senate controlled by nihilists.

    Harry Reid may be weak sauce, but at least he’s not actively trying to destroy the country.

    What the fuck should we do? I mean, how much further does the country need to go down the drain before voters wake up?

  78. 78.

    Jebediah

    The Michael Hastings crash site has sprouted a bunch of little flags. Here is a picture I took this afternoon on the way home from work.

  80. 80.

    Steeplejack

    @Yatsuno:

    I always felt like she was this blog’s Edward (from Cowboy Bebop). Often maddening but occasionally useful.

    Just saw the episode “Jamming with Edward” a couple of weeks ago, and it got me thinking about the later episode where Edward leaves. There is a lot of sadness in that show. Not least the fact that Amazon wants 125 woolongs for the whole series on DVD. WTF?! That’s 24 half-hour episodes.

  82. 82.

    Yatsuno

    @Steeplejack: Look up CrunchyRoll. My brothers use that as the Netflix for anime. $7.99 a month for unlimited streams and their selection is amazing.

  83. 83.

    Anoniminous

    @fuckwit:

    If the electorate turn-out matches 2010 then the Democrats probably will lose the Senate. Politics happens 24/7/52/365. One would think Democratic voters would know that.

    They don’t.

  85. 85.

    Concerned Citizen

    @Narcissus: It doesn’t. The media repeats the same pattern regardless of what it’s covering. Nate will clash with ESPN eventually.

    Sam Wang is the guy to go to. No drama.

  88. 88.

    Senyordave

    @JWL: Michael Caine’s actual quote about “Jaws: The Revenge” is even better:

    I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

  91. 91.

    eemom

    @Jewish Steel:

    Come Back To The Five and Dime, Toko Chan, Toko Chan!

    omg, what an amazing movie that was. Not that I’ve seen it in five thousand years…..but I have a pretty good memory for an old CRONE…..as toko-loko used to call me.

    [sniff]

  93. 93.

    Jewish Steel

    @eemom: Also, too, I knew the mention of Nate Silver’s opining would draw your ire. Any time I read some sketchy shit he says, I think of you.

  94. 94.

    ? Martin

    @efgoldman: No, but my mom moved around a bunch (her husband’s promotions moved him around a lot) and landed in MA for a while. I never lived there but visited a number of times.

  95. 95.

    eemom

    @Yatsuno:

    I wonder if we can talk her into de-lurking.

    See, if I do say so myself, it just shows to go ya my analogy about her being a precocious toddler wasn’t too far off.

    A precocious toddler sucks up every ounce of oxygen in a roomful of adults…..makes it impossible for anyone to carry on an adult conversation….even stinks the place up with its poopy diaper.

    Still, you kind of miss the damn thing when it goes off to bed. : (

  96. 96.

    Chris

    @Yatsuno:

    I wonder if we can talk her into de-lurking.

    GAAAH please don’t. Only thing that could possibly top the T&H infestation would be her return.

  100. 100.

    Violet

    @NotMax: I would enjoy it if Nate Silver hosted a talk radio show. Okay, maybe not. But the idea of it is entertaining. People call in and Nate Silver explains how the data shows they are entirely wrong and they’re making their decisions based on how they feel and fear and not on data. Over and over again. I’d love that show.

  103. 103.

    Anne Laurie

    @Susan:

    I keep hoping that one day he will re-open it. Until then, I stay on the lookout for Billmon Spottings.

    Someone tweeted him recently, asking if he’d ever go back to ‘longform’ writing. He replied something like “After a lifetime of doing it professionally, longform feels too much like work.”

    I suspect he’d only reopen the Whiskey Bar if “we” had something as catastrophic on the horizon as the Cheney Regency’s drumbeat for war in the Middle East. So, in that context, I don’t want Billmon to be writing longform again!

  104. 104.

    KS in MA

    @efgoldman: Ha! You just reminded me of an entire period of my working life (we won’t call it a career). There were Wangs everywhere in the Northeast in the 80s, weren’t there?–with all the attendant jokes. I still kinda miss the Execute key.

  106. 106.

    Tripod

    Ahem.

    Poblano

    Moving to ESPN. Like the good doctor.

    When in doubt, bet the dark side. It is the nature of this business we have chosen.

  107. 107.

    burnspbesq

    @Sparky:

    The good news is you get a free trip to Hawai’i.

    The bad news is you’re getting tossed into an active volcano.

    Gone-o-rhea. Shee-it.

  109. 109.

    Buddakon73

    Pretty sure Silver is taking 538 and moving it with him, and will use it for ABC come election time (according to TPM anyway).

  111. 111.

    gelfling545

    @Jewish Steel: Because you were I’d imagine told by your teachers, as I was, to use a comma where one would pause in speaking? It can leave you seriously over comma-ed.

  112. 112.

    AHH onna Droid

    @lamh36: Elon made me laugh. God u r so wrong for that, mr #twib dude sir. Tho it’s really Salon who’s wrong.

    I would get fired where I work if I called somebody a n* and right fully so.

    Soooooo post racial, calling the sheriff, I mean the USAG and the POTUS by extension a niclang.

    Did they call RFK a paddy and a mick? Ugh.

  113. 113.

    AHH onna Droid

    @mai naem: Cant say no to a boy from Old Florida?

    Nelson (D-Assisted Living) is big on constituent services for the ssi crowd, and they vote. Mack lives ib California. Total joke campaign.

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