The 2017 Baseball Hall of Fame inductees will be announced later this month, and Curt Schilling is once again expected to come up short. The former Cy Young Award winner is convinced that has much more to do with his political opinions than what he accomplished in his career.
And he’s probably right.
In an interview with TMZ this week, Schilling said he believes nearly all of the 400-plus voters would give him a thumbs up if he bashed Donald Trump rather than supporting the president elect.
“They’re not hiding the fact that they’ve stopped voting for me because of the things I’ve said on social media,” the 50-year-old said. “That’s their prerogative as voters. … If I had said lynch Trump, I’d be getting in with about 90 percent of the votes this year.”
A few months ago, Schilling shared a photo on social media of a man wearing a shirt encouraging people to lynch journalists and described it as “awesome.”
Schilling added that many of the voters are hypocrites for keeping him out of the Hall because of his character, noting that there’s a tendency to “pick and choose” which players to apply the character clause to.
“The people who have said they’re not going to vote for me are not going to vote for me because of the character clause,” he said. “There are some of the worst human beings I’ve ever known voting. There are scumbags all across — if they don’t believe my baseball talents merit me getting into the Hall of Fame, so be it.”
Schilling is one of only 16 pitchers with 3,000-plus strikeouts in his career. His 216 wins are a bit low for some people, but he ranks third all-time in strikeout-to-walk ratio. The strongest case Schilling can make for Cooperstown is his 11-2 record and 2.23 ERA in the playoffs, where he was downright dominant.
Are many voters keeping Schilling off their ballots because he has made unpopular remarks like this? Most likely, but he still has a few years to get in. It’d be a surprise if he doesn’t eventually get to the Hall.
