It took a little longer than expected, but statistician/writer/Jew Nate Silver finally took a big step forward last year and joined the major leagues.

A highly touted prospect out of Michigan, Silver has been mucking around the bush leagues of statistical baseball analysis with the wonks from Baseball Prospectus since 2004.

Scouts had been impressed with his overall eye and projectability, rating his mathematic power a pure 80 on the scouting 20-80 scale (sadly, his camera-friendliness is more of a 35). The statistics also bore out with a strong CPP (Correct Prediction Percentage) in the lower levels, but many felt that he needed to strengthen his secondary offerings.

By 2008, most were predicting a solid season for Silver, but nothing like what actually happened. With his creation of the political prediction site FiveThirtyEight and his subsequent success in predicting the results of the 2008 presidential election, Silver shot into the stratosphere, appearing on such major media outlets as MSNBC, The Colbert Report, and the New York Times. By the end of the season, he had actually exceeded his 95th percentile JewCOTA projection (our proprietary software which allows us to predict the future success of Jews).

Based on strong peripherals from previous seasons, we're projecting continued growth for Silver, especially if he can consolidate his earlier gains at the lower levels.

Overall, we think he'll see a solid-to-remarkable improvement in his VORJ (Value Over Replacement Jew) over the next few seasons, pointing him toward a Hall of Fame career.