Nate Silver Quotes

Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.'

Analytics, math, science has gone into a lot of different areas of the NBA.

I'm not a big 'Moneyball' fan.

We just kind of relied on written scouting reports through the eighties and even the early nineties. I've really been amazed by some of the data that's out there, especially with regards to tendencies of hitters, and certainly tendencies of pitchers as well. I would have loved to have gotten that data when I played.

The numbers are hard to control.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

I understand what sabermetrics get across, and what they're getting across is to keep it simple. Especially for me, as a pitcher, that's something that helps me - finding ways to keep it simple. Numbers can only tell so much.

The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.

Though 'Moneyball' had the talents of screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin going for it, they weren't baseball insiders.

Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.

Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

There is nothing better than walking out and hitting a home run.

If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Now the advantage is all with the hitters.

If I'd just tried for them dinky singles I could've batted around .600.

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

When numbers are being crunched by politicians, axes are usually grinding.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

I probably hit 35 balls into the right-field bleachers.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.