We have mentioned before how we used to spend hours during our younger days scanning the backs of baseball cards and tabulating statistics for “teams.” When that got old, we went back and compiled minor league statistics. Yeah, we were a sports blogging baseball nerd even before the Internet existed. But as handy as we think we are with numbers, we could never hope to be as good with them as the gentleman Stu offers up in The Commenter Talker Of the Day:

From the Washington Monthly:

“And speaking of polls and impressive showings, how did Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight do? Nate’s final projections showed Obama winning with 348 electoral votes and 52.3% of the popular vote. As of this morning’s count, Obama has 349 electoral votes and 52% of the popular vote.”

From Stu: Silver, of course, is the Baseball Prospectus guy who created the PECOTA stat and predicted the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays this year. He’s having a good year, it seems.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account Obama’s clutch speeches in swing states, which registered an impressive “Airwolf” on my Clutchosity Index.

Our questions:

Are baseball and politics really that predictable if we just look at the numbers?

Is Nate Silver the new Bill James?

Do you dress up for your driver’s license picture?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.