CURT SCHILLING: HERO, PARIAH, DIME-STORE BLOWHARD (TRUMP?) OR JUST PLAIN DYED-IN-THE-WOOL BIGOT???
You’ll indulge me and pardon me, I humbly ask you.
But is Curt Schilling not one of the largest keyholes known to man?
He idolized his father, “…the glue that held my family together.”
That’s okay and even can be good. More on that later.
But c’mon.
Seriously.
How can he justify — never mind to millions, but more importantly to himself — the nonsensical, banal babble which is constantly and forever launched projectile-style through his mouth?
Apparently he feels it necessary to have his flapping gums keep pace with his larger-than-life ego.
An impossible task.
Made especially so because he’s a blowhard with an ego the size of one of the Earth’s seven continents. Or all of them.
A Trump-like ego.
Two peas in a pod strangely.
Schilling, a much-decorated marvelous and gutsy major league starting pitcher for twenty seasons (1988–2007) can’t get out of his own way.
Can’t leave it alone or let it go.
He has demonstrated a peculiar and unnatural propensity to speak without boundary. (And he must enjoy listening to and hearing the sound of his own voice).
To wit:
“I had three jobs my junior and senior year of high school. I worked for the gas station and worked for a pizza place.”
Or “Baseball is not a sport you can achieve individually.”
How about reconciling these beauties?:
“I don’t have any problem with government helping entrepreneurs and businesses.”
with
“Every dollar I can’t commit to my company that’s paid in taxes is paying a government I believe is too big and doing way too much that I don’t want done.”
Clearly this man is hardly a moron.
Keyhole? Yup. Blowhard? You bet.
Not nearly as smart as he thinks? Without question.
I mean let’s ask his daughter about the seismic cyber fallout which threatened to swallow her whole after Dad, in his infinite wisdom tweeted something about her future which perhaps he should have kept off the internet.
Proud Papa? Ok.
Poor judgment bordering on stupidity? Yes indeed.
And sadly, that’s not all.
He’s a misogynist, blatantly and proudly anti-transgender, a bigot (refer to his postings of tasteless Twitter memes regarding Muslims with the common thread of “Muslims=Murder” running through them; he compared Muslim Jihadism and German Nazis and commented, “…the math is staggering when you get to the true [number]s.”) and accuses others of being racist in a feeble stab at shifting blame (see proposed debate dialogue with Stephen A. Smith).
He’s Donald Trump masquerading as Curt Schilling.
During an interview broadcast on a Kansas City radio station at the beginning of March Schilling posited that Hillary Clinton should be “buried under a jail somewhere,” in response to a query about her email brouhaha.
“I hope she does [go to jail]…If I’m gonna believe, and I don’t have any reason not to believe, that she gave classified information on hundreds if not thousands of emails on a public server after what happened to General Petraeus, she should [be] buried under a jail somewhere.”
(Petraeus was sentenced to two years’ probation by a federal judge for providing classified information to a woman who was writing a book about him and with whom he was having an affair).
He and the Donald use the same writers apparently.
And not surprisingly, he supports Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
“I care what people think, but that doesn’t change what I say. I am who I am.”
Perfect.
’Nuf said.
A bona fide hardball hero was Curtis Montague Schilling.
His 216–146 Record, 3.46 ERA and 3,116 Career K’s — 15th.-most in MLB history — perhaps make him Hall-of-Fame worthy on their own merit but he was even bigger and better than those numbers suggest.
(To the 3,116 Strikeouts: Schilling has the highest strikeout to walk ratio — 4.38 — of any pitcher with at least 3,000 K’s. Pedro Martinez is second at 4.15. And he is one of only four hurlers to have reached the exalted 3,000 K plateau before issuing his 1,000th. Career BB. The other 3 are Fergie Jenkins, Greg Maddux and Pedro.).
He was a 6-time All-Star; a 3-time World Series champion; a World Series MVP; an NLCS MVP; a 2-time MLB Wins Leader and a 2-time NL Strikeout King.
And he was lights-out in the Postseason: 11–2 with a 2.23 ERA & a Postseason Winning Percentage of .846 (an MLB record among hurlers with at least 10 decisions).
His signature moment(s) and that for which he’s remembered most vividly came in the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees when he pitched 7 innings in a must-win Game 6 with a bloody right sock. Sutures securing a severely dislocated tendon and torn sheath in his right ankle gave way and the blood flowed.
The Red Sox won the game 4–2, went on to win Game 7 to complete a miraculous and unprecedented comeback from being down 0–3 and then won the World Series, reversing the curse and finally ending an 86-year nightmare for Red Sox diehards.
The bloody sock went to Cooperstown.
Of post-19th. Century pitchers, Schilling owns the second-highest JAWS rating of any pitcher not in the Hall of Fame, trailing only Roger Clemens. Btw, this is the same Clemens who mentored Schilling early in his career when he was acting out and “wasting his talent,” and whom Schill blasted on Capitol Hill in ’05 during his testimony about steroid use in baseball.
(The Jaffe WAR Score System or JAWS, devised by Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus in 2004 is a sabermetric baseball statistic which attempts to gauge and thereby assess a candidate’s viability for Hall of Fame induction by averaging a player’s career WAR — Wins Against Replacement — with their 7-year peak WAR.
Its mission is “…to improve the Hall of Fame’s standards, or at least to maintain them rather than erode them, by admitting players who are at least as good as the average Hall-of-Famer at the position, using a means via which longevity isn’t the sole determinant of worthiness.”).
In fairness, Curt Schilling has had more than a peck of troubles in an otherwise charmed existence.
He lost his father Cliff with whom he was very close in January 1988 before he made his major league debut. (He reserved a seat for his Dad in every game he started).
Both he and his wife have battled cancer. She deals with major depression. All 4 kids were diagnosed with ADHD. One son fought childhood anorexia. Another has Asperger syndrome. Their daughter lost part of her hearing in tenth grade.
Then of course was his post-baseball gaming company debacle.
And his well-documented ESPN travails.
Not easy.
Look, Curt Schilling is entitled to be who and what he wants to be, just like anybody else. And he has been and undoubtedly will be until he draws his last breath, many things to many people.
Really, who are we to judge?
But we have to be accountable for what we say and do.
Schilling is.
“I’ve made mistakes, I’ve misspoke, I am sure I will again sometime, but that happens, that’s part of being human in my book. I’m OK with that. I’ve never done it maliciously, ever.”
Problem is it’s hard to keep track of what you say and how you say it when you find it nearly impossible to stop talking.
Ask Donald Trump.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in August 2016.]
