In maybe the juiciest free agent signing since LeBron James bolted for Miami three years ago, it looks like Nate Silver, the political forecaster behind the FiveThirtyEight blog, is departing the New York Times after serving out his initial, three-year contract, and going to ESPN. According to (who else?) the Times, Silver will, presumably among other things, appear frequently on Keith Olbermann’s forthcoming, New York-based late-night show on ESPN2, and also do some politics work for ESPN’s corporate sibling ABC News. He had reportedly been in negotiations with the Times to sign a new contract.

Silver, who a decade ago was working at Baseball Prospectus analyzing the sport with advanced statistics, started blogging about politics at Daily Kos and then his own blog during the 2008 primaries and election. He became popular for forecasting elections, most prominently the presidential election as it plays out in the electoral college (hence “FiveThirtyEight,” for the 538 electoral votes), by averaging polls and weighting them to adjust for the ways in which they had been inaccurate in the past—a method not dissimilar from the one he used to devise a well-regarded algorithm for forecasting the future performances of baseball players. He moved his franchise to the Times in the summer of 2010. Particularly last November, he became a lightning rod for this more empirical way of following elections, as contrasted with the “narrative”-heavy approach of many pundits. He did not reply to a request for comment Saturday.

ESPN has been trying to land Silver for at least five years. Gary Belsky, a onetime editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine now a content consultant and contributor to Time, told me Saturday that that original effort had been spearheaded by Gary Hoenig, then the general manager of ESPN Publishing, and that the original plan had been for Silver to write for the magazine and ESPN Insider, a collection of paywall-protected premium content on the web. (Hoenig was reportedly laid off along with hundreds of other ESPN employees last month.) According Times TV beat writer Brian Stelter, NBC and MSNBC were among Silver’s other suitors this time around.

“His departure,” reported Stelter (who received a reporting assist from James Andrew Miller, a frequent Times contributor on ESPN news who also co-wrote the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All The Fun), “will most likely be interpreted as a blow to the company, which has promoted Mr. Silver and his brand of poll-based projections.” And it will similarly be interpreted as a boon for ESPN, which is worth an estimated $40 billion and is by far the most important media company in the world of sports; it is arguably the most imporant asset that its parent company owns—and its parent company is Disney.

The specifics of the new deal are unclear, and neither the Times nor ESPN (or Disney) has confirmed it.