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Craig
R. Wright worked
21 years in major league baseball, primarily in the area of player
evaluation. He was one of the early pioneers taking an approach that
integrated science with baseball. He is most often associated with the Texas
Rangers where he got his start in the early 1980s, but his longest
association with a big league team was a 10-year run as a year-round
consultant to the Los Angeles Dodgers. During that period the Dodgers had the
second best record in the league, trailing only the Atlanta Braves during
their amazing streak of divisional titles. From
1989 to 1996, he also provided a supplemental Advance Scout service for
post-season play that was used by six pennant winners and four World
Champions. He ended that service to have the time to work two years as a
year-round consultant to the Arizona Diamondbacks in their preparation for
their expansion draft. Arizona’s expansion draft was the first to produce a
40-homer player and two All-Star players who were
not their team’s token All-Star representative — i.e. not the team’s lone
All-Star. He also was a consultant for a dozen years with STATS Inc, designing their products for major league teams and
some cross-over products used by the media. Craig had a deep love of baseball history instilled in him by his grandfather and was the co-creator of the radio show A Page from Baseball’s Past, which ran for 26 seasons as a pre-game show in major league baseball. His partner in the show was his long-time friend Eric Nadel, who has been broadcasting the games of the Texas Rangers for more than 30 years now and in 2014 received the Hall of Fame’s Ford C Frick award for excellence in broadcasting. Eric
was the producer and voice of the program, and Craig researched and wrote the
shows. It consisted of a short entertaining story from baseball’s history
which was sandwiched around a radio ad. It was used for decades as a pre-game
show before Texas Rangers baseball games and at various times the scripts or
tapes were used in other big league markets,
including Baltimore, Detroit, and San Francisco. Nadel and Wright also did a book together called The Man Who Stole First Base (Taylor Publishing) which was a collection of stories that had been featured on the radio show. They also collaborated on a CD of select shows with 100% of the proceeds being donated to charity. The radio show eventually ended and in semi-retirement Craig has kept the story series going with a subscription text version. Beyond credit as co-creator, Nadel is not involved in the text version Pages from Baseball’s Past. Craig is the primary author of The Diamond
Appraised (Simon
& Shuster). His third book Pages from Baseball’s Past (ACTA Sports)
came out in 2013. Craig and his wife Cathy live in Helena, Montana. Their
daughter Laina lives in California and their son Joshua in Helena. Rounding
out the family are Maggie the dog, and Piper the cat.
Click
here to learn more about the book The Diamond Appraised Craig did an in-depth
interview on his career in baseball which can be read at: “Touring the Bases with Craig
Wright” - interview with Seamheads.com in 2010 Below is a section that had appeared on the
website DiamondAppraised.com with additional details on his career.
Like a lot of folks who
find themselves saddled with a public persona, there have been things put out
in the public domain about my career that are off the mark — sometimes to the
point of being exactly the opposite of the truth, or literally involving a
completely different person. You get used to having to live with such
nonsense, but I’ll take this opportunity to correct some of the false
notions. Most are such obvious mistakes that they quickly fall by the wayside
and are not worth addressing. For example, a writer for the Associated Press
once criticized the impact my book The Diamond Appraised had on pitching practices in baseball, and specifically
credited it with helping to kill the 4-man pitching rotation — a rather
remarkable charge given the chapter in the book titled “Bring Back the
Four-Man Rotation.” When contacted, the writer admitted he had never even
seen the book! There is also a bit of
confusion about some of the teams I worked with and some folks have
incorrectly written that they include the Mets and Mariners. Not sure why
someone would think the Mets, but I’m pretty sure the Seattle mistake stemmed
from a newspaper article in which the Mariners talked about trying to hire
me, and somewhere along the line someone missed the part in that same article
that noted that I declined. Another off the mark
claim that was recently brought to my attention was a baseball executive who
did an interview where he mentioned knowing me back in the early 1980s and
that I “went on to be the founder of STATS Inc.” Not even remotely close.
STATS Inc. was a client of my consulting business. I certainly was not the
founder of the company or involved in its startup in any way. The most common
mistakes involve the timeline of my career, with common assumptions that it
started much later than it did by over a half-dozen years. I first began
working in major league baseball after the end of the strike in 1981. To help straighten out a
few other things, I have five sub-pages you can visit: My problem with “Moneyball,” by
Michael Lewis My Corrections and Additions to “The Numbers Game,” by Alan
Schwarz Wikipedia Twisting the Truth - Voros McCracken Entry Correcting
the Perception of My Role in the Rockies “Hampton-Neagle”
Signings |
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The E-version of Pages from Baseball’s Past is dedicated to the memory of Stan Reynolds |
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