Larry McCray

Lawrence E. McCray

• School Union College (NY), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• High School Ithaca High School

• Born 1942
• Died December 26, 2023 in Lexington, MA USA

Biographical Information

Larry McCray was a baseball researcher whose primary area of interest is the early history of the game, before the creation of the first professional league in 1871. He was the curator of the "Protoball Project" which assembles all known materials relative to this period of baseball's development.

In 2011, he was named to the Baseball Origins Committee set up by Major League Baseball. He was distinguished with the Henry Chadwick Award in 2017.

While he received his PhD from MIT, it was not in engineering, but in government studies as his thesis was on the subject of government regulation. He later became a professor at MIT, teaching a course on science policy. He had previously served as a project director at the National Academy of Sciences from 1981 to 1998, working on defining government policy on subjects linked to science development. His 1983 report on Risk Assessment is considered one of the seminal texts on the issue of federal risk regulation.

Further Reading

• John Thorn: "Larry McCray (1942-)", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 46, Nr. 1 (Spring 2017), p. 104.

Related Sites

• Protoball.org