July 19, 2013

Nate Silver to switch his statistics work from politics to sports.

He's leaving the NYT for ESPN.
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.
I take it ESPN has lots of money and the Times does not.

I had to look up the word "sabermetrician." Wikipedia says: "Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face."