Before Billy Bean and the sabermetric revolution upended baseball and ushered in a new era of statistically driven baseball analysis, old-timers insisted that the young eggheads and their spreadsheets were no match for a time-worn scout. Experience, gut feeling, and a sense of the intangible qualities that make up a quality prospect — these were the things that the old guard argued could never be captured by an Excel spreadsheet, let alone a statistical model.

By and large, they were wrong, and Billy Bean’s scrappy Oakland Athletics squads showed that the so-called eggheads could see further into the future and with greater clarity than had previously been thought possible.

The same statistical revolution that changed baseball has now entered American politics, and no one has been more successful in popularizing a statistical approach to political analysis than New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who of course cut his teeth as a young sabermetrician. And on Nov. 6, after having faced a torrent of criticism from old-school political pundits — Washington‘s rough equivalent of statistically illiterate tobacco chewing baseball scouts — the results of the presidential election vindicated Silver’s approach, which correctly predicted the electoral outcome in all 50 states.

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