It’s only a small part of Curt Schilling’s HOF résumé, but if you’re a Jays fan, you remember: in
Game 5 of the 1993 World Series, the game before the game that even non-Jays fans could tell you
about, Schilling pushed the Series to a Game 6 by throwing a 147-pitch shutout. He gave up five
hits, walked three, and struck out six. I’m not sure if anyone’s thrown as many pitches in a WS
shutout since then--truthfully, I’m not even sure if anyone’s thrown a WS shutout period since
then. (Bumgarner?) Was Mitch Williams out in the bullpen warming up the last couple of innings?
Is Juan Guzman (who pitched really well too) still fidgeting around on a mound somewhere as I
write?
This year, and maybe (probably) next year too, Schilling is the most interesting HOF debate. The
Scott Rolen (somewhat of an itinerant, fragmented career) and Todd Helton (Coors Field) debates
seem to have resolved themselves--both have picked up a lot of support, and both are going in
(next year for Rolen, soon after for Helton). The Schilling debate, as with the procession of
PED players from the past few years, has nothing to do with performance; I doubt there are many
writers who wouldn’t vote him in on the merits if he were Orel Hershiser or Fernando Valenzuela
or any other pitcher who was generally considered to be a Nice Guy and Good Person. But Schil-
ling, these days, has probably surpassed Bonds and Clemens and A-Rod as baseball’s #1 villain,
and as such, has both shifted and intensified the “character counts” argument that attached
itself to PED users the past decade or so.
Two prominent voters wrote at length about why they were dropping Schilling from their ballot
this time around, after having voted for him--and publically advocated for him--for years: Joe
Posnanski and Jay Jaffe. (Actually, Jaffe was limited to advocating; he’s a first-time voter
this year, even though he’s probably written about the HOF more than anybody the past decade.)
Posnasnki
Jaffe
Posnanski’s behind a paywall, unfortunately--it’s part of his “Outsiders” countdown, the 100 best
players eligible for but not yet in the Hall. He’s got Schilling at #30, quite a drop from where
he would have put him a few years ago. The accompanying write-up is a declaration, and quite com-
pelling:
“...it isn’t Schilling’s politics. It’s his nastiness. It’s his intolerance. It’s his compulsion
to troll. Curt Schilling pushes anger and fear and hatred. Every day he divides, every day he
offends...and all the while, he makes sure to note that those he offends deserve it, and bleep
’em if they can’t take a joke, and if they happen to have a Hall of Fame vote they should give
it to him anyway because he was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I’ve done
that for eight years. He was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I still rank
him as one of the 100 greatest players in baseball history. But I’m not voting for him. I sus-
pect he will get into the Hall of Fame anyway, and that’s fine. He doesn’t need my vote. He
shows every day he doesn’t want my vote.”
And to underscore his point, Posnanski has included in his countdown--and elevated their rank-
ings to a position not quite supported by their on-field accomplishments--a few players and
managers for the totality of their baseball lives: Curt Flood, Dale Murphy, Gil Hodges, Dusty
Baker, and Felipe Alou, and he’s about to list Buck O’Neil in his top three, possibly even #1.
I’m all for this. Curt Flood should absolutely be in the HOF, and now that Posnanski has me
thinking about Alou and Baker, I’d say yes to them too. Much less enthusiastic about Murphy,
but the point is, giving guys credit for things that aren’t reflected in their Baseball Refer-
ence career boxes, I think that’s a good and probably overdue idea. (I’ve even jokingly hinted
that players should get HOF credit for memorable nicknames--Al Hrabosky, your time may come
yet.) Which brings everything back to Schilling. Credit, yes; does the obvious corollary--that
they ought to be penalized when the totality is much less than what happened on the field--
apply too?
I’m less sure than ever how I feel about these things. Towards the end of Bonds’ career, I was
100% a defender; as time passed, and the utter freakishness of those last few seasons nagged
at me, I stopped caring. But I’ve also accepted that the ten or so players who’ve been kept out
of the Hall because of PEDs are barely the tip of the iceberg, and that there are users already
in there. I used to be bothered by itinerant careers like Rolen’s, or Tim Raines’; I still am,
but I’m not sure that I should be. I never liked the Andruw Jones or Joe Mauer type career where
a player’s value pretty much vanished after he turned 30 or 31, no matter how much they’d done
before that; I still don’t, but I’m not sure anymore whether that should make a difference. (Are
Albert Pujols’ HOF credentials any better today than they would have been had he retired in 2011
rather than limp along for another decade--recently as one of the worst everyday players in
baseball?)
Schilling’s even trickier for me. PEDs are presumably exactly as advertised: performance enhancing
drugs. Bill James (who, though I doubt he’d ever admit it, has himself been all over the place on
this issue) wrote last week that PEDs don’t matter because sabermetrics always measures performance
relatively, against the rest of the league, so a league- and park-adjusted stat like OPS+ puts
everything in context. I don’t know--doesn’t that start from the assumption that 100% of the league
was using PEDs? My sense is that the most liberal guesstimates generally put that number somewhere
around 50%. If you used, you benefitted; if you declined to, you didn’t.
But PES--performance enhancing stupidity--doesn’t exist. (PER--performance enhancing racism--does,
if you go back to Ty Cobb and anyone else pre-integration, in that every white player faced infer-
ior competition without any African Americans in the league. Relative to each other, though, they
all benefitted equally.) Whatever Schilling has said since he retired--and he’s said some horren-
dous things, right up to and including the recent attack on congress--he didn’t benefit from this
materially as a player. Even if he’d said these things while still active, ditto. For me, PEDs
were never a character issue, something I would try to explain whenever someone tried to wave
them away as such.
I would probably still hold my breath and vote for him. I think--I don’t know anymore. As I’m sure
Posnanski and Jaffe point out, HOF induction is about more than just the honour and the plaque; get-
ting into Cooperstown is a financial windfall in terms of what a player can charge for autographs
at card shows. So even if (how I envision it) you induct him and then have him experience the in-
dignity of a ceremony where everybody sits on their hands during his speech--the attending players,
at least, if not all the fans; you Kazan him, in other words--once that moment passes, he’s out
there charging $100 per signature for the rest of his life. And, you can bet, saying lots more
stupid stuff.
Character counts...I like Posnanski’s efforts in trying to get this idea to take hold, but I wonder
if that’s going to be even murkier than PEDs. With Schilling--or, at the other end of the spectrum,
Buck O’Neil--it seems clear-cut enough. But sometimes, like with Kirby Puckett (or, this year,
Omar Vizquel), you’re the greatest person in the world on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday you’re
not. Dick Allen was a pariah for years; as time passes, a much more nuanced and favorable view
of Allen has emerged.
I don’t have a vote, so I don’t have to decide. (Something else I always say to anyone exasperated
by my fence-sitting: if you don’t have a vote, agnosticism is perfectly okay.) For those who do,
it doesn't always seem to bring the same sense of excitement and privilege I’m sure it did two or
three decades ago. Ken Rosenthal, writing about his ballot this year: “Right now, I’m reconsider-
ing everything, including whether I still want to vote for the Hall of Fame.”
The results of this year's voting are released tomorrow night (Tuesday, Jan. 26). Schilling is
right on the fence at the moment: 172 voters have released their ballots ahead of the announce-
ment, roughly 45% of the electorate, and Schilling sits at 75.3%, just barely ahead of the 75%
needed for induction. The way it usually works with sabermetrically strong candidates like Schil-
ling is that they get their strongest support from voters who declare publically, then fall back
when the rest of the votes are counted. With Schilling, I was thinking that it might work the
other way, that some people who voted for him might want to keep that to themselves. But more
important than any of that, he's thus far lost one net vote from last year, when he ended up
with 70% support, so there's a good chance he'll miss again. (In a very strange development,
some people who voted for him this year have requested that Schilling's name be removed from
their ballots after he publically supported the insurrection three weeks ago.) If he does,
he'll have one last chance next year, his 10th appearance on the ballot. With Ortiz coming on
(A-Rod, also, who'll be starting an extended Bonds/Clemens purgatory that will take votes
away from others), and Rolen and Helton getting stronger--maybe Andruw Jones and Billy Wagner,
too--I don't see any last-minute momentum. If that's what happens, and he's dropped from the
ballot, he can then set up shop somewhere for the rest of his life and complain about a rigged
election, just like his mentor.