Summary[]
Ben and Sam talk to Nate Silver about baseball analysis and the first six months of FiveThirtyEight.
Topics[]
- Interview with Nate Silver
- Developing FiveThirtyEight
- FiveThirtyEight audience
- Best time to write about sabermetrics
- Nate's baseball research ideas
- Baseball TV broadcast contracts
- Evolution of WAR
- Predicting playoff success
- Repeating research
- PECOTA projections
Notes[]
- Nate expects the topics that FiveThirtyEight covers to become broader as the website continues to develop. They have already started to do more traditional reporting since their launch six months ago.
- Nate says that FiveThirtyEight's daily traffic breaks down roughly to 40% new readers, 30% returning readers, and 30% loyal readers.
- Nate is concerned that a bubble is developing with regard to the large TV contracts that baseball teams are signing, which has quickly inflated the value of teams and their ability to sign players.
- Compared to other sports the different WAR metrics in baseball are very similar.
- Given the volume of sabermetric research being done Nate is not surprised that work is being repeated or often not being noticed until many years later.
Links[]
- Effectively Wild Episode 538: Nate Silver, By Popular Demand