CNN screengrab via youtube.com

Baseball has been very, very good to Nate Silver.  So has politics. 

A baseball fan and statistician par excellence, he is one of the top guns at Baseball Prospectus, which uses its own variants on the Bill James "sabermetrics" system to analyze major-league baseball teams and predict their future performance.  Among his many achievements, Silver invented the PECOTA system — which predicted the stunning rise of the Tampa Bay Rays from cellar-dwellers in 2007 to 90-game winners in 2008. 

In the fall of 2007, he started putting his statistical chops to use on polls and other political data, posting at Daily Kos under the name "poblano".  As the weeks progressed in the pre-primary and primary seasons, "poblano" got to be a force to be reckoned with among his fellow Kossacks; his diaries, which at first seldom got more than a couple dozen comments, soon would receive hundreds of comments and would find themselves on the Recommended list with great regularity.   In March of this year, still writing as "poblano", he would start the FiveThirtyEight.com website with Sean Quinn, crossposting his initial posts there to his Daily Kos diaries.  Word began to spread away from the blogosphere and into the traditional media about this guy who named himself after a hot pepper — and whose political predictions were blowing away those made by the most respected pollsters and pundits around.  His big breakthrough came in May; when everyone else was predicting that Hillary Clinton would take Indiana handily and be neck-and-neck with him in North Carolina, he predicted that Hillary would barely win Indiana and lose big to Obama in North Carolina — and he was right.

At the end of May, "poblano" revealed himself to be Nate Silver.  Hardcore sabermetrics fans nodded knowingly; it would take someone of Silver’s skills to be so phenomenally skilled at predicting primary outcomes.   The mainstream press’ interest grew as the primary season gave way to the general-election campaign, and Silver’s predictive, demographics-based models got even better as more data came in.  At the end of the campaign, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect gave Silver an A+ for his predictive work, saying "Always trust Nate Silver."

All of this has now paid off for him:  He’s got a book deal for not one, but two books, for a reported $700,000, via Penguin Group USA.  Take a bow, Nate Silver!  You did good.