Craig R. Wright

Craig R. Wright is a baseball writer and historian who is a major proponent of sabermetrics.

Career

Major League Baseball

He was a very early pioneer in integrating science into Major League Baseball and first began working under that premise for the Texas Rangers, after the strike of 1981. He soon became the first front office employee to work under the title sabermetrician, but he abandoned the title around 1990 because he felt "... the meaning had shifted too far from a scientific approach to baseball to one focused on statistical analysis of baseball." By the end of his career he appeared to be more comfortable being identified with the scouting community than with statistical analysts. In the 2000 media guide of the Colorado Rockies, he was listed in their scouting section as "Special Assignment Scout." This remained a hot topic in his philosophy in his writings during retirement. In a rare in-depth interview in 2010, he steadfastly maintained his alligiance to the value of a science of baseball while at the same time speaking at length about the dangers of focusing on statistical analysis to understand the game. "I’ve said it and written it many times: statistical analysis is too often taken for being science itself rather than a tool of science."