So here’s this person, David Wright, adored equally by Broseph and little girls, who for years has come into my living room and suffocating dorm room and accompanied me over the radio on long car rides, and I’m not really sure I know that much about him. He never has a bad word for anyone, not another player, not an umpire. He always says the right thing, which can be horribly dull. He is never one to lose his composure either – maybe he would spike an occasional batting helmet, but that’s it. He reminds me of people encountered in life that are perfectly nice and no one has a bad thing to say about, but you just don’t ever take any interest in them because they are boring, at least to you. Wright comes on my TV and goes 3-5, and then does it again the next night and the next one and on into forever – his greatness is as easy to overlook as a skyscraper passed by daily. He is perpetually great, a droning of awesome. Wright is consistency, and consistency is monotony, and monotony is by definition difficult to notice.
– Patrick Flood, Exile on 126th Street.
This is an awesome, awesome post that says many of the same things I was, or am planning on saying about Wright in the season-in-preview piece later today, only more creatively.
Flood is spot on about Wright being awesome to the point of monotony, and so boring a superstar that he’s frequently overlooked. I fear the media has created this monster.
You watch Wright speak to the press, it’s like he goes into a zone — so focused it’s almost like he’s at bat or something. Like Flood, I don’t know David Wright, but it sure feels like he’s been exceptionally well-trained to handle the media. And perhaps the best way to handle the media is to never say anything interesting at all. That’s a shame, of course, but that’s probably the reality of it.
Tedquarters 
Anecdotally speaking, isn’t Wright actually kind of a streaky player? I wouldn’t say he’s less consistent than anybody else in MLB but I certainly wouldn’t say he’s more.
That’d be an interesting thing to investigate. His streakiness has definitely been noted, and perhaps in seasons, he’s streaky. But I wonder if you could isolate segments of any player’s stats by arbitrary endpoints to make him look streaky. That might just be the fallout of a sport where the best players fail 60% of the time.
Across seasons, he’s been remarkably consistent, obviously. Last year is the exception to the rule, of course.
This is a perfect example of your new format. I like it.
I do get a little bored by David’s perfect media persona sometimes, but lord knows I’d do the same thing (assuming I could do it that well). You give anything at all to media, they will wield it against you somehow, someday.
Beltran, for a sad example. The man has apparently been playing on pretty painful knees for most of the last few seasons. The first tack he tries is being frank – “I’m at 85%”. Which becomes a widely mocked joke, and somehow we get this goomba perception of Beltran as fragile, rather than as the tough mothereffer that he apparently is. He learned from this, and so early last season we heard nothing about his pain, even though it was obvious from the way he was playing that it was only a matter of time before he would be going on the DL. And then the way he was playing – the not sliding, etc – was just interpreted as more Pagan-esque brain lapses on the bases.
I could go into a whole thing about the way Pagan is perceived, too, but I’ll stop here. ;)