Say what you will about Curt Schilling and his blowhard attitude, but at the time being we have no reason to believe he wasn’t one of the clean guys during a tainted generation. Schilling dominated throughout much of his career and had his fair share of injuries toward the end, but his name has not been linked to steroid use. According to the three-time World Series champion, it would have been if the Boston Red Sox had their way.
During an interview with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio on Wednesday (via WEEI.com), Schilling said that members of the Red Sox organization encouraged him to use performance-enhancing drugs when he was recovering from an injury in 2008.
“At the end of my career, in 2008 when I had gotten hurt, there was a conversation that I was involved in in which it was brought to my attention that this is a potential path I might want to pursue,” Schilling said before noting that the people involved are no longer with Boston. “It was an incredibly uncomfortable conversation. Because it came up in the midst of a group of people. The other people weren’t in the conversation but they could clearly hear the conversation. And it was suggested to me that at my age and in my situation, why not? What did I have to lose? Because if I wasn’t going to get healthy, it didn’t matter. And if I did get healthy, great.
“It caught me off guard, to say the least. That was an awkward situation.”
Incredibly uncomfortable, and incredibly illegal. Schilling is never afraid to speak his mind and seems to love creating drama, so we have to consider the source. That being said, most people assume that teams have an idea when their players are using steroids but they simply turn a blind eye. As Schilling said before, it’s unlikely that any team has won cleanly in the last 20 years, and obviously management would be aware of that.
On Thursday, Schilling was asked why he would not out the person who advised him to take steroids instead of covering for them:
@dankelley617 Because outing the person would not do anything for anyone. It wasn’t anyone in uniform, nor the baseball ops group
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) February 7, 2013
Teams encouraging players to use PEDs would bring the issue to an entirely new level. It’s one thing to ignore steroid use — it’s another to encourage it. At the very least, Schilling’s assertion is one that Major League Baseball will not be able to ignore.
Photo credit: Greg M. Cooper-US PRESSWIRE
