The task presented 373 days ago to Curt Schilling was as challenging as the reward was vast. In fact, it was right there in the headline.
This didn’t require Schilling, an increasingly vocal member of the far-right movement, to stump for whomever won the Democratic nomination for President, nor did it require him to repudiate the incumbent.
All he had to do to make it to the Hall of Fame this year, after receiving 70 percent of the vote last year, was not jump into pots of self-boiled hot water. That…did not happen.
Schilling’s 2020 was so filled with social media missteps (chronicled here, along with his earlier controversies, by Hall of Fame historian, author and voter Jay Jaffe, who notes “(i)ts’s nearly impossible to keep track of it all, even in an exercise like this”) that it qualified as a minor surprise when his vote total, revealed Tuesday, actually increased a bit to 71.1 percent, which left him 16 votes shy of earning the 75 percent necessary for enshrinement.
This was Schilling’s ninth year of eligibility, which means he officially still has one more chance on the writers’ ballot. But given his rhetoric this month — when, among other things, he expressed his support for the insurrection at the Capitol — and his Facebook post requesting he be removed from next year’s ballot, it is decidedly unlikely he’ll take the stage at the Clark Sports Center in July 2022.
“Curt Schilling may have talked and Tweeted his way out of the Hall of Fame,” Bob Costas said on MLB Network Tuesday night.
While Costas does not have a Hall of Fame vote, his words Tuesday night served as a poignant reminder that the baseball media establishment so loathed by Schilling overwhelmingly WANTS Schilling in there, because anyone who covered the game during Schilling’s career understood he would understand and appreciate the Hall of Fame honor like few others.
Most players get their fandom wrung out by the realities of the game. But Schilling, who named his oldest son after Yankees legend Lou Gehrig, never seemed to shed his initial love for the sport. He helped break the news of his trade to the Red Sox in 2003 by posting with Sox fans on the Sons of Sam Horn message board. In 2015, he thanked Hall of Fame tracker Ryan Thibodaux for his efforts and passion.
And most superstars, consumed by their tunnel vision, are reluctant or unable to provide in-depth analysis of their feats. But nobody talked baseball like Schilling, who possessed a photographic memory and could break down the intricacies of pitching in a manner that made it easily understandable even for those of us who never stepped upon a mound beyond Little League.
Superstars in decline are a particularly vulnerable and touchy species. But Schilling, whom I covered with the Red Sox in his final four seasons from 2004-07, was able to eloquently acknowledge what was happening.
“I mean, I feel like from a command standpoint, I can still dot a gnat’s ass, you know?” Schilling said in August 2006. “I feel like (Terry Francona) can count on me giving a minimum of six or seven innings every time he gives me the ball. And I’ve never looked at that as being a great attribute. But you take what you can get when things are not going the way you want them to go.”
On June 7, 2007, Schilling came within an out of his first career no-hitter but gave up a single to Shannon Stewart after shaking off catcher Jason Varitek. At 40, he knew he wouldn’t get that close again and said following the game the near-miss gave him “…a big ‘What if?’ for the rest of my life.’”
The cruelest irony is the trait that helped fuel Schilling’s Cooperstown-worthy career has endangered his candidacy. He threw a 147-pitch shutout to extend the Phillies’ season in Game 5 of the 1993 World Series. Eight years later, he mocked the Yankees’ “aura and mystique” and then helped the four-year-old Diamondbacks end the Yankees’ dynasty in one of the greatest World Series ever played.
In the same press conference during the 2004 ALCS, Schilling said he relished the idea of helping end a World Series drought and loved nothing more than shutting up 55,000 New Yorkers. He did the latter by extending the greatest comeback in baseball history by winning Game 6 of the ALCS on a bleeding ankle held together in MacGyverian fashion. Eight days later, Schilling, acquired to be the final piece in a long-awaited championship puzzle, celebrated the Red Sox’s first title in 86 years.
If there’s a downside to being the centerpiece of so many iconic moments, it’s trying to figure out what to do for an encore over the next several decades. How do you garner attention and generate an adrenaline rush after you’ve experienced highs that will be talked about and revered for as long as baseball is played?
You don’t need to be a Hall of Fame-caliber baseball player to understand there’s no real prize for saying stuff on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe it’s funny and people like it for a few minutes or hours, or maybe it angers people and elicits glee-inducing vitriol.
But social media is very fleeting and usually lacking least the permeance Schilling became accustomed to while authoring his iconic postseason moments. The only way to get noticed is to be prolifically outrageous.
The shame of Schilling’s transformation is he’s not far removed from standing up to the worst of social media’s attention-seekers and reminding them of the consequences of their actions.
In 2015, Schilling’s daughter was the target of vicious harassment on Twitter following his announcement she was going to play softball in college. Schilling responded with a blog post in which he outed some of the people behind the most disgusting Tweets. The lede to that blog?
“I thank God every day that Facebook and Twitter, instagram, vine, Youtube all of it, did not exist when I went to High School. I can’t imagine the dumb stuff I’d have been caught saying and doing.”
Perhaps with the idea Schilling might know better than he displayed on social media over preceding four years, Costas and Peter Gammons — each of whom has made no secret of his left-of-center political stances — presented Schilling a clear path to Cooperstown last January by conducting interviews in which he had the chance to display some contriteness and reshape his image for the electorate.
Whatever progress might have been made in those interviews was erased over the next 13 months. Schilling’s Hall of Fame hopes won’t end if he doesn’t get in via the writer’s ballot next year. The latest incarnations of the Veterans Committees elected five former players from 2018-19 after electing just five from 2000-17.
It’s easy to imagine him becoming the modern-day Jim Bunning, who is the only candidate to ever get at least 70 percent of the vote without being elected by the writers. Bunning, who produced iconic moments with the Phillies and finished far short of 300 wins, earned enshrinement via the Veterans Committee in 1996 while in the midst of a second career as a far-right politician who showed his softer side by writing the forewords to at least two books about perfect games.
But even if he gets in, a usually joyful occasion will be tempered by Schilling’s post-retirement behavior. Even those who have adamantly believed he’d deliver a truly great induction speech would sit on the edge of their folding chairs, wondering how much of his recent words, actions and reactions are performance art by someone trying to replicate the adrenaline rushes he created as a player and how much is something more sinister.
Our conversation in August 2006 ended with Schilling repeating his plans to retire when his contract expired acknowledged following the 2007 season — he ended up re-signing with the Red Sox after they won the 2007 World Series but never pitched again due to shoulder woes — and acknowledging he’d have a hard time adjusting to life after baseball.
“It’s all I’ve ever done — all I’ve ever known is this job,” Schilling said. “So I’m sure it’s tough. I’m looking forward to the off-the-field life challenges.”
It’s been more challenging than he, or we, could have imagined.
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