And if there's anything that goes hand in glove with baseball, it's numbers, another of Silver's childhood interests ('It's always more interesting to apply it to batting averages than algebra class')'. The Tigers became his team and baseball his sport.

It was 1984, the year the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. According to journalist William Hageman, 'Silver caught the baseball bug when he was 6. Silver showed a proficiency in math from a young age. Silver has described himself as ' half-Jewish'. Silver's father's family includes two uncles- Leon Silver and Caswell Silver-who were distinguished geologists. His maternal great-grandfather, Harmon Lewis, was president of the Alcoa Steamship Company, Inc. Silver's mother's family was of English and German descent. Silver was born in East Lansing, Michigan, the son of Sally (née Thrun), a community activist, and Brian David Silver, a former chair of the political science department at Michigan State University. Much of Silver's approach can be characterized by using probabilistic and statistical modeling to try to understand complex social systems, such as professional sports, the popularity of political platforms, and elections. His polls-only model gave Donald Trump only a 28.6% chance of victory in the 2016 presidential election, but this was higher than many other forecasting competitors. His subsequent election forecasting systems predicted the outcome of the 20 presidential elections with a high degree of accuracy. Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.S. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023. Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections.

Nytimes election forecast