Stat-crunching guru nails politics and baseball

Nate Silver is a nerd. The 30-year-old Chicagoan is a number-crunching stat jockey. And he’s becoming a household name.

Silver is an employee of Baseball Prospectus, an organization that works to rightly interpret baseball stats. Baseball Prospectus is regarded as a near-flawless authority in the sports world, and Silver is no small part of that success. How good is Silver at his job? He created PECOTA, an algorithm for determining a player’s success by comparing him to past players in similar career, style, and team settings.

Does PECOTA work? You betcha. Silver used PECOTA to predict, before the beginning of the baseball season, that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games this year. Consider for a minute how absurd of a prediction that was in April. The Rays had never won 70 games in their franchise history. But Silver saw that these players, based on historical precedent, were supposed to succeed this year.

He made the bold prediction. Tampa Bay went out and won 97 games.

While baseball is his day job, Silver has been rocking a bit of a political side-project. He created FiveThirtyEight, a site on which Silver tracks and interprets national polls in order to predict elections. After some of his underdog predictions for the Democratic primaries came to fruition, Silver – who was writing under the alias “Poblano” – found his site rising from 800 visits a day up to 600,000. It wasn’t until May that Silver revealed his identity – and much to the shock of baseball junkies everywhere.

FiveThirtyEight continues to gain notoriety as a reliable political resource. Silver’s success has gained him interviews with everyone from MSNBC to ESPN. A recent New York Magazine piece (great journalism in this article, by the way) about Silver’s rise from a math guy who loves the national pastime to political informant.

If anyone wants to doubt Silver’s methods, that’s fine. But – look now – the Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series.