The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Jacobs: Schilling should be in Hall of Fame
There will be one thing missing Sunday when a halfdozen players are inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame outside Clark Sports Center. As thousands of fans look to stay shaded and hydrated in the wicked July afternoon heat, yes, one thing will be missing. Curt Schilling’s voice.
And that’s a shame. Panamanian flags will fly and throaty voices will cheer for Mariano Rivera, the greatest reliever in major league history. Mike Mussina, who had a whopping 49 of his 123 Yankees victories saved by Rivera, will join Mo among the 2019 inductees. It will be a remarkable day for Yankees fans to make the drive to Cooperstown.
One thing would have made the day better. A Red Sox inductee to share in the celebration of the fiercest, most fascinating era of the sport’s greatest rivalry. Yeah, that would have been something.
And you know what the only worse thing could be? In Derek Jeter’s initial year of eligibility — he’ll be a shooin as a 2020 firstballot Hall of Famer — if Schilling misses out on Cooperstown for an eighth time.
If some sabermathematicians had taken their heads out of their — ah — decimal points to stop calling him borderline and, more poignantly, if some of the ardent defenders of First Amendment rights would have allowed Schilling to exercise his without trying to exclude him from a baseball museum, the guy would already be in Cooperstown.
In the seventh attempt of his 10year window, Schilling finished with 259 votes, 60.9 percent of the 425 cast. He needed 60 more votes to reach the 75 percent threshold for induction.
The four players ahead of Schilling (Rivera, Mussina, Edgar Martinez, Roy Halladay) were all voted into the Hall. Lee Smith and Harold Baines were put in by the Today’s Game Era Committee. So how does Schilling get 60 more votes? More writers can become convinced of his baseball ac
complishments and in a thin 2020, beyond the addition of Jeter, decide it’s time to enshrine him. Or, those who never liked Schilling can hold one nostril and vote for him. Or those who were deeply disturbed by some of his social media posts can hold both nostrils and vote for him.
No one is going to admit to a personal enmity toward Schilling as influencing their vote. Some have invoked the Hall’s character clause to explain why they will not vote for him. I wish those writers would reconsider. Schilling didn’t cheat with PEDs. He didn’t gamble on the game. He wasn’t arrested for some felony. He stands guilty of being a jerk, maybe a bigoted one, certainly a recklesstalking blowhard. Yet as a voter I have not and will not make the jump to keep him out of the Hall of Fame. He absolutely deserves it.
These are volatile times in our nation. Some of that volatility spilled into the sports world again this past week when ESPN’s Dan Le Batard ripped into his employer for its nopolitics rule: “We here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight, because Jemele (Hill) did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that, and then here all of a sudden nobody talks politics on anything unless we can use one of these sports figures as a meat shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects.”
Sports and society are not mutually exclusive. Any thoughtful person knows this. Yet there also is a line
on how far a sports media member can stray into the vitriolic world of politics. And you know how determines that line? The employer. ESPN needed more conservative voices a few years ago and Schilling blew it by doing things like telling a Kansas City radio station that Hillary Clinton should be “buried under a jail somewhere” for her classified email controversy. He posted a Twitter graphic with a picture of Hitler comparing the percentage of Muslims who are extremists to Germans in 1940 who were Nazis. During the North Carolina restroom controversy, he shared a distasteful meme on Facebook about transgender people with an image of an overweight guy in a blond wig and women’s clothing.
ESPN finally had enough and fired him in 2016.
After Hill tweeted that President Trump is a white supremacist and the White House’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders called for her firing, well, ESPN had enough of it all and clamped down bigtime on political discourse. That’s sad. Some spirited sportsinsociety debate is a healthy thing.
I have heard Schilling discuss conservative views maturely. He also has spoken out against the harms of chewing tobacco after his addiction led to cancer and he went after those tweeted horrible things about his daughter and, in the process, became a voice against bullying. How someone as smart as Schilling could have done some of the stupid, gross stuff he did on social media is beyond calculation. It’s enraging.
I’ll admit somewhere deep in my conspiratorial
soul I wanted that blood in his sock from the 2004 postseason to really be ketchup.
It wasn’t. Schilling pitching with a sutured torn tendon sheath is as real as his bloody wellearned reputation as one of the greatest postseason performers in sports history.
If you take his 216 wins, 3.46 ERA and the fact that he never won a Cy Young Award there is some argument, not a great one, against Schilling for the Hall. The fact is Schilling, who had 3,116 strikeouts, is one of the great controlpower pitchers ever, one who was a Cy Young runnerup three times. Among pitchers with 1,000 career innings, he has the fifthbest strikeouttowalk ratio. Among those with 3,000 innings, he is No. 1. Jay Jaffe developed JAWS ( Jaffe WAR Score system) as a strong way to measure a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness. It is their career Wins Above Replacement averaged with their sevenyear peak WAR. Schilling ranks 27th among pitchers. The only one above him not in the Hall is Roger Clemens (a PED story for another day).
What makes Schilling more than borderline, of course, is the postseason. He’s 112 with a 2.23 ERA and 120 strikeouts against 25 walks in 1331⁄3 innings. He allowed two or fewer runs in a stunning 15 of 19 starts.
You know how many big games I’d take Schilling over Mussina? All of them.
Even President Trump, quick to cross from politics to sports and even quicker to support a conservative voice, tweeted in January:
“Curt Schilling deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Great record, especially when under pressure and when it mattered most!”
One of my pet peeves among some of my fellow BBWAA voters and stat geeks is a tendency to undervalue postseason performance. It’s a huge criteria for me. In 1993 with the Phillies, 2001 with Arizona, 2004 and ’07 with the Red Sox, Schilling repeatedly proved his greatness under pressure. Yeah, Trump’s right.
After four years of under 40 percent support, Schilling got to 52.3 percent in 2016 before dipping to 45 in 2017 (postESPN firing). He rose to 51.2 in 2018 and 60.9 in 2019. He’s drawing closer. After Jeter in 2020, there are no big names in 2021 before David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez in 2022. That would be Schilling’s final chance. And who knows where Clemens and Bonds, also in their final year of eligibility, will stand by then.
Schilling would have plenty to say about the 2022 PEDpalooza, because, well, he has plenty to say about everything. The late Phillies catcher Darren Daulton dropped the mic on any succeeding attempt to define Schilling when he said, “Every fifth day Schill is our horse. The other four days he’s a horse’s ass.”
When it comes to Schilling and the Hall of Fame, we’d best be served by concentrating on every fifth day of his career.