Unfortunately, I was out for part of yesterday afternoon. As a result, I wasn’t able to participate in Nate Silver’s teleconference with the media.

ESPN did provide a transcript. It made for interesting reading.

While looking through it, I came away with one question: Will Silver actually be doing sports for the world’s top all-sports network?

I’m sure Silver will since he loves sports and that was his expressed reason for going to ESPN. Silver, though, made it clear sports won’t be the primary agenda for his new FiveThirtyEight site on ESPN.

“You know, what I’ve done now for politics at FiveThirtyEight is an approach we think is applicable to lots of areas,” Silver said. “Obviously I have a background in sports, and that would be a big focus here, but it’s not just going to be a politics site or a sports site.  There’s lots of potential in business and economics and weather and health and education and technology and culture.”

During the teleconference, Silver fielded questions about whether he will be predicting the winners of the Oscars and even the weather. Sports? What’s that?

According to an ESPN spokesman, the many non-sports questions were the result of the type of media on the call.

Deep into the teleconference, Silver finally was asked a sports-related question. There was this exchange.

Q: “I was just curious, you mentioned a little bit about how it’s not going to be strictly sports or strictly political.  What in your opinion would be sort of like the dream home page of what kind of topics you’re covering, if you can go a little bit more specifically into what kind of topics you would like to cover?”

Silver:  “I mean, one model we’ve talked about is kind of the old ‑‑ the current actually USA Today where you have those four sections; you have news, sports, money and life, and you can kind of fit most things we want to cover into one of those four bundles.

“So you have obviously sports is going to be an important focus of the site.  On the news side we’re probably more going to be concerned about elections in particular, but there’s some other types of news.  Weather is one I mentioned.  On the life side it can be fun, kind of cultural stuff, what’s the best place to live, also education‑related things, and then obviously we think we can do maybe a better job than current competitors about how you present economic data to people that understand some of the uncertainty when you have a job support ad every month, what that really means.

“Now, I also know that things will evolve over time, so I can’t predict what the exact mix of content will be.  I do want to emphasize we’re not pulling back from politics.  We’ll probably hire at least one more person to cover politics full‑time, so although my interests might be slightly more divided, we are certainly still going to be fathering election forecasts, certainly going to be writing other coverage of politics.  It’s not going to be a partisan site, as FiveThirtyEight isn’t right now.  It’s not going to be a political commentary, but to the extent there are data‑driven ways to look at politics, it’s been a very successful product for us and will continue to be an emphasis.

“But we have an ambitious and broad take on what we’d like the site to grow into.”

What about the television component for Silver and ESPN? John Skipper, ESPN president, offered a vague response, although he knocked down reports that Silver will be a regular on Keith Olbermann’s new show.

“We don’t have a programmatic plan for where Nate is going to appear,” Silver said. “It’s going to be much more opportunistic and it’s going to tie in much more with what he’s doing on FiveThirtyEight that we think will be interesting on television. The dramatic exception to this would probably be ABC News during an election cycle where we do have every intention of Nate appearing on ABC News to talk about the elections.

“The second point I would make is there have been some speculative notions about where decisions have been made about Nate on television, and those are just wrong.  We have not made any decision about Nate appearing on the Keith Olbermann show, we have not made any decisions about Nate being on the Oscars.”

Having said that, fully expect that Silver will make many appearances on Olbermann’s show. It would be a great platform for him.

I know Silver is about much more than sports. But I write about sports media. So naturally I am interested in his sports component.

It’s going to be a few months before his FiveThirtyEight site is up and running. When it debuts, we’ll get a better idea of how sports factors in.

I know this: Silver didn’t sign with ABC News. He signed with ESPN.

Looking forward to Silver crunching those numbers on my White Sox and beyond.