-By Warner Todd Huston
A recent USA Today article assessing former Red Sox great Curt Schilling’s chances to win a berth in the Baseball Hall of Fame concludes that his conservative political ideas will prevent him from being afforded that honor.
For the paper, Jorge Ortiz takes care to note that Schilling has a baseball career worthy of entry into the Hall of Fame. Schilling, Ortiz reports, has a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 4.38 which is the best of the modern era. He is also the only non-steroid tainted pitcher with over 3,000 career strikeouts not to be in the Hall of Fame.
“He won more than 20 games thrice in four years and finished second in the Cy Young Award voting all three times, twice behind Diamondbacks teammate Randy Johnson,” Ortiz says.
The sports writer goes on to point out a long list of other reasons Schilling deserves Hall of Fame inclusion including his famed performance in Game 6 of the 2004 ACLS where he brought his team back with a 4-2 victory despite that he was pitching with a torn ankle tendon that left blood visibly oozing through his sock.
But for Ortiz, all Schilling’s real accomplishments are erased by the pitcher’s post-career political opining.
Ortiz especially points to a recent Tweet Schilling posted slamming journalists. The tweet features a photo of a man wearing a T-Shirt that reads, “Rope, Tree, Journalist. Some Assembly Required.” To that image, Schilling added, “Ok, so much awesome here…”
Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who is planning to run for Senate in MA, approves of lynching tshirt. https://t.co/EZy1pxAmJk pic.twitter.com/vKifoYBK1S
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 7, 2016
Ortiz apparently feels that the attack on the liberal, PC obsessed media disqualifies him for inclusion in the Hall of Fame.
“Voters try to keep their personal feelings about a candidate — say, how he treated the news media — separate from the worthiness of the player’s case,” Ortiz wrote. “But the vile nature of Schilling’s comments extends beyond any individual grievances and brings into question his character, which is one of the considerations in the Hall of Fame ballot.”
The writer concludes that the anti-journalist tweet and his other conservative political views will torpedo his chances to make the Hall despite his obvious qualifications and playing excellence.
Ortiz concludes saying:
“Schilling not only sabotaged his broadcasting career with the way he repeatedly expressed his political views, but he continues to damage his chances of entering the Hall with offensive statements and a penchant for picking fights with journalists, the very people who decide who gets into Cooperstown. If his voting numbers dip below 50% this year, he may find it hard to reverse his candidacy’s downward momentum.”
It appears that PCism is far more important to sports journalists than excellence.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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