It's interesting that he would go to a sports network over the culture clash between statistics and narrative. Sports has traditionally been extremely negative on "stats geeks", and favored narrative explanations, along with factors like "grit" and "determination" and that kind of thing. Silver's own former work in sabermetrics was a frequent target of pot-shots from ESPN commentators for years. There used to be a bl…
I actually think the opposite: Sports is full of stats geeks. The whole essence of sports is statistical: Who gets how many points? Who runs faster? Who throws faster? Who's taller? Heavier? Who's highest ranked? Stories glue all of this together, but sports = stats.
I think of that as more akin to how political pundits use polls: they cite numbers, but they object to the use of statistics as an analytical tool to tie them together. The Moneyball approach in baseball was hugely controversial, as were (are?) sabermetricians like Silver trying to push predictive statistics like VORP and FIP over the more traditional descriptive statistics. Perhaps more to the point, also to challenge traditional narratives (not that different from the political horse-race narratives) of "momentum" and "choking" and "playoff runs" with statistical analysis. The above-cited Joe Morgan (ESPN commentator 1990-2010) was a famous example of ranting on air constantly about this kind of thing. One of his more notorious comments was that on-base percentage (OBP) is a stupid statistic because he doesn't like people "clogging up the basepaths". Perhaps that genre of ESPN commentator is finally on the way out.