Nate Silver ("Blogger for Times") joining ESPN

Here you go for the rest.

http://www.politico.com/playbook/0713/playbook11201.html

 

I agree wholeheartedly. When he wrote his American League MVP analysis, particularly when he became the name that resonated with people on this board most in that debate, I was upset because his argument was without nuance compared to so many better pro-Mike Trout pieces. There's a detachment to Silver's writing and analysis that serves politics but not sports.

I disagree wholeheartedly. The work the Times' sports department has done with interactives and long-form feature writing absolutely is pushing new ground in sports writing. The design is the best in the section. The Derek Boogaard series was the best sports journalism of the past few years, a comprehensive, intelligent, nuanced and popular look at one of sports' biggest issues. The Times has not turned its back on advanced analysis at all, either. Tyler Kepner is one of the best at balancing modern analytics with traditional columnizing. Howard Beck does the same for basketball occasionally. Though they have been shuttered (a decision that was not made by the sports department), every Times sports blog focused on new ways to view sports, and that level of analysis often made it into the print edition.

 

Yeah, this.

 

It's interesting that that has become Silver's brand - and I don't doubt that it has. Silver himself is constantly announcing from the mountain tops that he can only predict events within a degree of certainty, sometimes a very, very slight degree of certainty. He exploited a niche in politics in which there was a ton of data - and the mainstream media was basically ignoring it in favor of Peggy Noonan-style tea leaf reading.

He first came to prominence as the inventor of PECOTA baseball projections. They were consistently the most accurate of their kind. But that's world's largest midget territory. He acknowledges, for example, that Baseball America's traditional scouts more accurately ranked prospects than he did.

Basically, Nate Silver is right now a prisoner of his own success. One high-profile miss, and he's tarnished, even though he acknowledges readily that occasional misses are intrinsic to his field. One high-profile hedge, and suddenly people think he's gone soft, even though he has extensively excoriated the Dick Morrises of the world and their go-for-broke, attention-whoring predictions.

I'm sure plenty of people are already anxiously awaiting Nate Silver to miss on a Super Bowl pick, to cite just one example, even though Silver himself would tell you that it's too small of a sample size to accurately predict. Which, of course, many people would read as a cop-out on his part. One of Silver's skills is knowing his own limititations - or, rather, the limitations of predictive analytics generally. For example, in "The Signal and the Noise," he devotes a chapter to the fact that earthquakes seem beyond precise forecasting.

 

Mainstream media ignored Silver's data for the same reasons WWF waits three hours into a pay-per-view telecast to put on a championship match that everyone knew Hulk Hogan was going to win. If you make the result too clear too early, you lose viewers.

FNC knew Romney was losing. Hell, FNC was proudly part of the reason he did lose, to the point of letting Karl Rove make a fool of himself on election night.

 

Yeah, I want crazy predictions from Silver...

By the all-star break, Josh Hamilton will be hitting under .280 and will be dropped to seventh in the order...

 

Is there any value to the types of sports predictions Silver would dominate? For instance, though his analysis of why Mike Trout deserved the 2012 American League MVP was thin, he surely could crunch numbers to accurately predict who will win almost every postseason award voted on in a semi-transparent fashion. But I'm not sure the interest level makes that kind of analysis worthwhile, at least not at the salary ESPN is paying Silver for. Heisman predictions aside, does anyone care that much about that stuff?

 

Yeah, I'm sure he can forecast Heisman voting, which will put him on par with every other writer in the country.

When was the last time the Heisman winner produced a surprising outcome?

I see him crunching numbers and telling us who is the most deserving for all awards in all sports, but if that's all he does, he won't be worth it.

 

Yes. PECOTA. He invented it. It has made Baseball Prospectus - and fantasy owners - piles of money.

 

Isn't the bigger story here that, in the age of democritization of media, the big dogs dominate again. Silver went from BP to independent blogger guy to the New York Times to TV network.