Nate Silver

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Nate Silver (Nathaniel Read Silver, b. 1978, East Lansing Michigan; now residing in Chicago, Illinois) is Executive Vice-President of Baseball Prospectus. He is best known for inventing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of minor league and major league baseball players.

Since 2003 he has written a weekly column for BaseballProspectus.com under the heading Lies, Damned Lies, in which he applies sabermetric techniques to a broad range of topics in baseball research -- on forecasting the performance of individual players, the economics of baseball, metrics for the valuation of players, developing an Elo rating system for Major League baseball,^[1] and many other topics.

He is also a co-author of the Baseball Prospectus (ISBN 0-7611-3995-8) annual book of Major League Baseball analysis and forecasts as well as other books published by Baseball Prospectus, including Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning (New York: Workman Publishers, 2005) (ISBN 0-7611-4018-2) and Baseball Between the Numbers (New York: Basic Books, 2006) (ISBN 0-465-00596-9).

He has been an occasional contributor to ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, Slate, and the New York Sun.

In 2000, Silver graduated with Honors from the University of Chicago, where he studied economics. He then worked for three years as an economic consultant with KPMG before joining Baseball Prospectus.

Silver was the 1996 Michigan John S. Knight High School Debate Champion. While in college he served as an expert on Scoresheet Baseball for BaseballHQ.

In his spare time, Silver uses his analytical approach at the poker table where he plays semi-professionally. He is not related to his fellow Chicagoan and namesake "Nate Silver" who at 5' 8", 150 lbs., played quarterback for the Notre Dame football team in 1902-1905.