Jay Powell, a star pitcher at Mississippi State in the early 1990s, played 11 seasons in the major leagues, a career highlighted by a World Championship with the Florida Marlins in 1997. He now is a high school pitching coach in Jackson and often provides analysis on MSU baseball broadcasts.
So when Powell talks baseball, as he did Wednesday on the Sports Talk Mississippi radio show, I’m inclined to happily defer to his expertise. I respect his opinions.
But Powell got it wrong Wednesday.
The subject was the previous day’s announcement for the Hall of Fame inductees. David Ortiz was the only player to be chosen on the required 75 percent of the ballots cast by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). Among those who failed to meet that threshold was Curt Schilling, whose credentials certainly are worthy of consideration although there are more egregious omissions than Schilling.
Powell said the reason Schilling wasn’t selected is because Schilling is a conservative and ”99 percent” of the BBWAA members are liberals. Politics, Powell said, is the reason why Schilling isn’t in the Hall of Fame.
Wrong.
I may not know baseball to the degree Powell does, but I know a lot about baseball writers and something about Schilling, too.
Baseball writers are a breed apart, something I learned when I left Mississippi to become a sports editor for a newspaper in Northern California, which had writers assigned to both the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s.
Here’s a portrait of a baseball writer:
A year after arriving in California, I went to work for the San Francisco Examiner. The sports editor there, Glenn Schwarz, had been the beat writer covering the San Francisco Giants for 20 years before moving on to become sports editor. One thing struck me as odd about him: He was 45 years old, but had just married, had his first child and bought his first home. He was doing all the things for the first time that most people do when they are half his age. Why? He was a baseball writer. There was no time for that other stuff.
From 1998 until 2005, I was sports editor in Phoenix. The Arizona Diamondbacks began play the year I arrived, so I spent a lot of time thinking about baseball, talking about baseball and planning for baseball. The beat writer I hired for the job, Ed Price, was pressed from the same mold as Glenn. No minor detail of the team escaped his attention.
From my own semi-frequent trips to the ballpark and daily conversations with Ed, here is what I can confidently say about Schilling and his four years with the Diamondbacks.
First, Schilling was a gifted pitcher. Together with Randy Johnson, they formed the best starting pitcher combination in memory, ultimately leading an otherwise average Diamondbacks team to the world championship in 2001.
Contrary to Powell’s account, though, Schilling was never aloof around the media. In truth, he never met a camera, a tape recorder or a reporter’s notebook he didn’t like. Baseball writers called him “Red Light Curt” (a reference to the red light on a TV camera when it’s on). He loved and craved the media’s attention.
Johnson, by contrast, was a very private person, which translated into what is best described as surly. Reporters approached Johnson the way you might approach a pit bull tethered to a paper chain: with great caution. Despite that, Johnson was selected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Johnson’s relationship with baseball writers was no impediment.
Furthermore, Schilling never expressed much interest in politics back then. His main interest then was video games, which he and his investors would come to regret. Schilling lost his entire earnings from his baseball career — $115 million — as well as a $75 million investment from Rhode Island taxpayers when his “38 Studio” game-design company went belly-up in 2012. Politics became his hobby and obsession only after that disaster.
So, when you consider who it is that votes for the Hall of Fame, politics seems as unlikely a factor as eye-color.
That is not to say baseball writers don’t have their biases, but if they dislike Schilling, there are other, far more likely reasons for leaving him off the Hall of Fame ballot. If there were a vote taken for The Narcissism Hall of Fame, Schilling would probably be on every ballot.
Schilling’s relationship with the writers put him in the position of needing the benefit of the doubt where the Hall of Fame is concerned. Writers weren’t inclined to do him that favor.
So as much as Schilling and others might like to portray this as a case of liberal cancel culture, it just doesn’t have the ring of truth.
It’s personal, not political.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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