The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
born 1970 · South Bend by birth, Notre Dame by formation
Craig John Counsell was born August 21, 1970, in South Bend, the only child of John Counsell — captain of Notre Dame's 1964 baseball team and a former minor-league outfielder — and Jan Counsell. He grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; the South Bend tie is his birth, and the playing formation, unusually, also runs through this ground, because he walked on at Notre Dame under Pat Murphy and became the program's player: a .306 average across four years, 204 runs, 166 runs batted in and 50 doubles, most valuable player of the 1992 Irish, and an accounting degree. Colorado drafted him in the eleventh round in 1992.
Sixteen major-league seasons followed — 1995 to 2011, for Colorado, Florida, Los Angeles, Arizona and Milwaukee — and two of them ended with Counsell at the center of a World Series Game 7. Traded to Florida on July 27, 1997, he hit .429 in the League Championship Series, and in Game 7 of the World Series his ninth-inning sacrifice fly off José Mesa tied the game; in the eleventh he scored the winning run on Édgar Rentería's single off Charles Nagy. In 2001, with Arizona, he was the League Championship Series' most valuable player, .381 against Atlanta, and in Game 7 of the World Series a Mariano Rivera pitch hit him to load the bases for Luis González's walk-off single. Two championships, two Game 7s, his fingerprints on both finishes. After playing he managed Milwaukee from 2015 to 2023 and the Chicago Cubs from 2024 — the eighteenth Indiana-born manager in major-league history, on the count published when he took the Brewers' job. Of the men in this record he is the rare one whose birth here and whose making here are both documented, though the boyhood between them was Wisconsin's.
Sources
- Hunter Seidler, SABR biography of Craig Counsell — the South Bend birth and family, the Whitefish Bay upbringing, the Notre Dame walk-on years and the degree, the 1997 and 2001 postseasons whole.
- Baseball-Reference Bullpen and The Baseball Cube — the draft position, the sixteen seasons and the managerial record.
- Prep Baseball Report, 2015 — the count of Indiana-born major-league managers.