Nate Silver

So, I saw Nate Silver speak the other day. The day started with him giving a lecture to the stats and math departments. This is where he got into the nitty-gritty of weighting variables and the problems of polls and what-not.

After that was dinner, which is where the fun begins.

Nate Silver is a HUGE nerd/geek/what-have-you. He also has the mouth of a sailor (slight hyperbole). We talked a lot about guber-national races, his success so far, and what he has learned from this election. After a lot of people were satisfied with the political questions, I slipped in my first baseball one. (These aren't actual quotes, Chris Getz stole the batteries out of my tape recorder.)

Q: If you were to go back to PECOTA and make adjustments to your model, what would you change?

A: I would adjust more for the health of a player. Some teams are much better at other teams at keeping a player healthy, I think that could be factored in. Also, staying healthy is also a skill for some players, I think it could use some more weight. Also, in the post-steroid era some change should probably be made to account for the change in numbers that we are seeing.

At this point I made a comment about a certain article that was written about the subject. He said he'd check it out, but he remembers reading a thing or two about health already.

When asked about the differences between doing baseball projection and political projections he went on a bit of a tangent. He talked about how everything in baseball has been recorded neatly by nerds over years. That there is so much data to mess with and that that is very different than politics, where it is very hard to get solid numbers on much of anything. The acceptable R-squared values in political science is really laughable compared to pretty much every other science.

He said in baseball he felt like he could be more liberal with his projections. He said something about how in the history of baseball anything that could happen on a baseball field, has happened on a baseball field. No prediction can really be too outlandish. This isn't the case for politics. I'm not really sure where he was going with this, and he seemed to agree, since he dropped that line of thought quickly.

Someone in the group then made a quip about the Derek Jeter Gold Glove, to which he said, "what can you do?"

A Twins fan in the group asked about the Twins and the Cubs chances of World Series success, to which Silver responded along the lines of don't count on it anytime soon, especially for the Cubs. At this point he talked about how he grew up in Michigan and is a big Tigers fan and a little bit of a Cubs fan.

His talk was pretty much what he says on 538. He talked about why 2010 happened the way it did and why the media doesn't know a damn thing about stats. He called the Tea-Party statistically insignificant and called bullshit on this being an "anti-incumbent" year. This is a baseball blog though, so I'd rather keep the politics out of it.

Nate Silver has also seemed to have learned a bit about public speaking. He seemed fairly comfortable talking in front of a large group, but a friend of mine commented that he had very happy feet.

Sorry there wasn't more baseball to report.