Nate Silver Breaks Up With NYT But It's Cool Because They Didn't Really Want To Date Him Anymore Anyway

Are you Nate Silver fanboys? Are you also into sportsball? Then you have probably been fapping 24/7 since yesterday's announcement that pint-sized stats wunderkind Silver is taking his toys and leaving the New York Times to go to ESPN to helm up some multifaceted job-creating machine. (No, really. That's pretty much what ESPN says at the link. You think we actually want to write things that sound like that?) Anyway, leaving, job-creating, sportsball, EXCITEMENT At least we didn't have to endure a LeBron James-style teevee show about whether Silver would stay or go. The NYT, however, is a little bit of a sore loser about the whole thing:

I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

Leave it to the WASPs at the NYT to have perfected the fine art of criticizing while complimenting. Nate, you're not really one of us, and you're disruptive, but sort of movie-star disruptive, so don't be offended, ok? See, so friendly, yet still cuts you down to size. Genius.

Also, too, people on the print side of the NYT didn't like Nate Silver and were not going to let him play their reindeer games:

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Haha we are just going to wildly speculate (because we don't have any actual data, duh, and we don't employ Nate Silver to statistically model things for us because he costs like a billion dollars now) and say that the "three high-profile Times political journalists" might be such luminaries as Ross Douthat , David Brooks , and Thomas "Mustache" Friedman . Even if we are entirely wrong about our guessing, and we probably are since they are columnists and not journalists, we're still unhappy that Nate Silver is considered less of an asset to a paper than Huey, Dewey, and Louie are.

So, congrats Nate Silver. Shake the NYT dust from your feet and tell us how excited you are for ESPN:

"The variety and quality of the assets ESPN and ABC News presented to me was compelling and unparalleled," he said. "I can't wait to get started."

That is the least exciting sounding excitement we have ever heard. If we got someone to build us a giant multifaceted media machine, we would have at least thrown in a "FUCK YEAH" while talking about it. Oh well. That's probably why the NYT and ESPN and other alphabet soup media companies are not in a bidding war for yr Wonkette. Their loss.

[ NYT / USA Today ]