Silver's Gold

Time to check in on Nate Silver, the sabermetrician who created Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA forecasting system and predicted the Rays winning 90 games this year way back in February. It seems that he's made a relatively smooth transition to electoral predictions:

Shortly before Tuesday's vote, Chief Numba-Cruncher posted his final prediction for the 2008 Presidential Election: Barack Obama would win the election with 52.3% of the popular vote, while John McCain would collect 46.2%. The final vote tally as of this morning? Obama 52.4%. McCain 46.2%. One-hundred-and-twenty million votes were cast and the dude was off by one-tenth of one percent. (He also called 49 of the 50 stats correctly.) Holy. Crap. [Emphasis added.]

His lone mistake: he incorrectly called Indiana for McCain. His model predicted an average number in the electoral college of 348.6 for Obama and 189.4 for McCain (there are decimals because it is the average result of multiple simulations of the model), and the final tally looks like it will be 364 to 174, with the flip of Indiana basically accounting for the difference. Not too shabby. Vindication for the stat nerds. What's also interesting is that he was off by just a tenth of a percent in the election, but his average error for his baseball predictions was significantly greater, in the range of 9 wins per 162 game season (although PECOTA was still the best this year). Conclusion? Baseball is less predictable, and therefore more interesting, than politics. QED.