Nate Silver, best known as the founder of FiveThirtyEight, is recognized as a statistical mastermind and the leader in the field of data journalism. Silver originally used his statistical genius for baseball, but eventually thrust himself into the political realm. Now, Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, which has expanded into a major resource for sports analytics.
Initially, Silver worked with KPMG as an economic consultant. Discontent with his work, Silver pursued a side project that combined two of his interests––statistics and baseball. After continuous effort, this side project evolved into PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), a system that applies sabermetrics to predict player performance. PECOTA was sold to Baseball Prospectus (BP) in 2003, where Silver began writing a weekly column (“Lies, Damned Lies”) and was eventually named managing partner of BP. Silver’s work at BP was best demonstrated by his 2004 article Baseball Prospectus Basics: “My name is Nate, and I am a forecaster. I forecast how baseball players are going to perform” bluntly describes his role in baseball statistics. He further detailed PECOTA and his advanced analyses of baseball, writing:
PECOTA accounts for these sorts of factors by creating not a single forecast point, as other systems do, but rather a range of possible outcomes that the player could expect to achieve at different levels of probability. Instead of telling you that it’s going to rain, we tell you that there’s an 80% chance of rain, because 80% of the time that these atmospheric conditions have emerged on Tuesday, it has rained on Wednesday.
Surely, this approach is more complicated than the standard method of applying an age adjustment based on the ‘average’ course of development of all players throughout history. However, it is also leaps and bounds more representative of reality, and more accurate to boot.
Forecasting has come of age. There is real science behind these things, provided that you take the time to apply it.
After writing strictly about baseball analytics for years, Silver began to branch out anonymously into politics, largely out of frustration for the analyses he was seeing. “I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, especially when it came to quantitative things like polls and demographics.”
Writing under the pseudonym “Poblano” for Daily Kos, Silver studied political polling and disagreed with the predominant interpretations of the polls. Poblano’s deviation from the masses unexpectedly–but accurately–predicted the outcome of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Still writing as Poblano, Silver launched his own website–FiveThirtyEight.com, named for the number of electors in the electoral college.
Due to the increased interest in his work, Silver decided to reveal himself as the author of those bold predictions two months after FiveThirtyEight’s launch. But when Silver chose to claim his work, only serious baseball followers were able to actually identify who Nate Silver was. That soon changed though, as Silver emerged as a leading statistician and data journalist––predicting the 2008 Presidential Election correctly in 49 states. His efficiency clearly interested many; FiveThirtyEight’s views reached four million on Election Day.
But many questioned why Silver would make the drastic shift from baseball to politics, especially after being managing partner at BP, writing a collection of articles, and writing numerous books. To the naked eye, sports and politics appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. However, Silver recognized similar threads between politics and sports. “It reminded me of baseball, when you see the same recycled clichés and conventional wisdoms over and over again, some of which isn’t very wise.” Silver saw how he could apply those principles used in baseball analytics to politics, “[a]nd so this March, I created a Web site called FiveThirtyEight.com (named after the number of votes in the Electoral College) to try and apply the same scientific spirit that we’ve used in baseball to the political world.”
In June 2010, Silver and FiveThirtyEight partnered with the New York Times. Silver explained the transition in a piece for FiveThirtyEight:
In the near future, the blog will “re-launch” under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of the New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine. The partnership agreement, which is structured as a license, has a term of three years.
After that three year agreement expired, Nate Silver decided to “quit” the New York Times. And in July 2013, ESPN announced their acquisition of FiveThirtyEight. Margaret Sullivan, public editor at the New York Times, analyzed Silver’s decision to leave: “I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.” Certainly Nate Silver’s approach to politics differed from the New York Times’ standard perspective. And apparently many at the Times did not appreciate his innovative data journalism. But Silver stated that the culture was not a major factor in his decision.
Initially, writing as Poblano allowed Silver to keep sports and politics separate. Writing under his own name he could continue at BP, while writing as Poblano allowed him to anonymously write about politics. As founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight (once acquired by ESPN), Silver gave himself the flexibility to write about sports, politics, or anything else. And his time with the New York Times allowed Silver to garner an expansive readership and, perhaps, additional credibility. Working with ESPN also gives Silver another opportunity––to be a political analyst for ABC News, as both ESPN and ABC share Disney as a corporate parent. In describing this new opportunity, Silver said:
This is really kind of a dream job for me, and the more we thought about it, the more excited that I became. What I’ve done now for politics at FiveThirtyEight is an approach that we think is applicable in a lot of areas. It’s not going to be just a politics site or just a sports site, there’s lots of potential in business and economics, and weather, health, education, technology, culture. It’s really more of a horizontal approach.
FiveThirtyEight gives Nate Silver and his team of journalists a rare opportunity to explore the possibilities of data journalism in the realm of sports. Most current media that utilizes advanced data is not using the data to its full potential. According to Silver, “[t]he problem is not the failure to cite quantitative evidence. It’s doing so in a way that can be anecdotal and ad-hoc, rather than rigorous and empirical, and failing to ask the right questions of the data.” And in the case of sports in particular, the opportunity is so great because “[s]ports has awesome data.” Not only is there an expansive volume of sports data, or “big data,” but as Silver says, “[i]t’s something much better: rich data.” Silver continues by saying, “By rich data, I mean data that’s accurate, precise and subjected to rigorous quality control.”
In sports, the data is constantly growing, thanks in large part to player tracking and companies like SportVU, the data from almost every object on the playing field is recorded in real time. Since there is that data being recorded so often—practically daily—in real time, “Sports offers fast feedback and clear marks of success.” Data can be studied and applied each day in sports. For example, in the NHL, data can be analyzed after every game and a coach can recognize necessary changes. Since that data was recorded in real time, it is readily available immediately after that game. Rather than having to wait to test out changes based on that data from the prior game, there is likely another game in quick succession within the eighty-two game schedule to test the data during.
And these statistics can be applied based on the same set of rules because “In Sports, we know the rules.” The rules in sports are explicit and rarely change; at most there are minor tweaks here and there at the end of each season. What makes sports data even more ready for analyses is that the objective of each game is clear: win, by any means. Sports is one of the few times that the objective is black and white.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight takes a different approach than traditional media to its analysis of sports. Through its non-traditional means of examining the statistics and each outcome of play, rather than utilizing the data to adhere to a specific idea, Silver has created a mecca of sorts for sports analytics. FiveThirtyEight covers a myriad of sports from an innovative perspective, further integrating sports to rich data.