Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight leaving NYT for ESPN

The statistical analyst and blogger who moved from baseball into politics and had a leading role in New York Times coverage during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections is going back to sports. Silver is taking his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN and will be on the staff and a regular on the new Keith Olbermann show, plus will also have a role on ABC News during election years, according to Brian Stelter at the New York Times. Stelter cites "ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans," and none of the parties commented, so I guess it is not official yet.

Before creating statistical models for elections, Mr. Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future. For a time he was a managing partner of Baseball Prospectus. At public events recently, he has expressed interest in covering sports more frequently, so the ESPN deal is a logical next step.

Mr. Silver’s three-year contract with The Times is set to expire in late August and his departure will most likely be interpreted as a blow to the company, which has promoted Mr. Silver and his brand of poll-based projections. He gained such prominence in 2012 that President Obama joked that Mr. Silver had accurately predicted which turkeys the president would pardon that Thanksgiving. “Nate Silver completely nailed it,” he said. “The guy’s amazing.”

Speculation about the future of Mr. Silver and FiveThirtyEight heated up shortly after last November’s election, and he was wooed by no small number of other news organizations. Jill Abramson, the newspaper’s executive editor, and Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said earlier this year that they would try hard to sign Mr. Silver to a new contract. NBC News, joined by its cable news channel MSNBC, and CBS News were also among the interested companies.

In an e-mail several weeks ago, Mr. Silver said negotiations were continuing with The Times “and I’m still trying to make a decision.” He informed The Times on Friday of his plan to leave.

Silver on "The Colbert Report