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" It&amp;#039;s fairly well-known that I occasionally go a-wanderin&amp;#039; into sportswriting. (Once, I went a-wanderin&amp;#039; into it for 19 consecutive years, more or less.) It was while I was chasing the people who chase the spheroids, oblong and otherwise, that the brutal hooley sprang up between the Old Baseball Hands and the new, stat-conscious, SABR-ized people who insisted that Everything You Knew Was Wrong. I largely stayed out of the fight for several reasons: 1) It was baseball, after all, so who cares? (When certain people started bringing their math homework into basketball \u2014 and, yes, I&amp;#039;m looking at you, Yglesias \u2014 then I got frosted.) But baseball? All I care about baseball is that they continue to play it in the summer, and that summer continues to be a pleasant time to sit outside. My needs are small. 2) I refuse to believe that the enjoyment of anything can be enhanced by the inclusion of math. 3) Both sides were so deadly-ass dug-in and serious about their positions that it was far more fun to stand in the middle of things and make fun of them both. Old Baseball Hands have been worthy of mockery since Harry Wright hung up his mustache wax in Cincinnati, and the stat-head youngsters were just so damned earnest about being revolutionaries that they became very big fish in very tiny barrels. As I recall, I first noticed the name of Nate Silver when he was one of the latter group, and a contributor to an occasionally fascinating \u2014 and occasionally dumbfoundingly arcane \u2014 publication called Baseball Prospectus. He later drifted into politics, where he has been a rather smashing success. The way you know this is that, suddenly, all over the punditariat, from the vast canyons of tedium through which echo the thoughts of David Brooks, to the yapping kennel of spaniels that is Tiger Beat On The Potomac, Silver has become Target Zero because he persists in saying that, by his calculations, Barack Obama continues to have a slightly better chance of being elected next Tuesday than Willard Romney does. But what those of us who knew Silver in his other life know is that, simply put, he&amp;#039;s fighting the same battle all over again, except that he&amp;#039;s talking about demographic slices and political probability. In this scenario, David Brooks is some old grumblefish from the BBWAA who has been mourning the loss of spittoons in the press box for four decades. I don&amp;#039;t know where to put the TBOTP cool kidz in this formulation, unless they&amp;#039;re the 22-year-old sound-gatherers from the local sports-talk station whom everybody hates. (And, yes, in case you were wondering, there was more than a little out-and-out fag-baiting around the ol&amp;#039; press ox bar, too, although nothing quite as excreble as that produced by this human turnip.) The one thing that the stat-heads had over the Old Baseball Hands was that the former generally were smart and the latter were generally, well, not. This also seems to be true in the latest iteration of the argument in which Silver now finds himself entangled. Here, for example, is Joe Scarborough, engaged in a remarkable feat of Being Stupid: &amp;quot;Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance \u2014 they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it&amp;#039;s the same thing,&amp;quot; Scarborough said. &amp;quot;Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they&amp;#039;re jokes.&amp;quot;  Does Squint understand statistics less than he understands the Electoral College? It&amp;#039;s a close run thing. And that&amp;#039;s not even getting into the fact that we are listening to complaints about Nate Silver from the members of a professional pundit class that, judging by its track record, would have bet against gravity 30 seconds after Galileo dropped the hammer. Personally, I think the spirit of Dick Young has overcome the media world. OVER ON THE CULTURE BLOG: Stephen Marche on Why We Need Nate Silver So Badly "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16495/nate-silver-critics-14261107/>