Blackballed From Cooperstown For Being A Conservative? Obvious Baseball Hall Of Famer Curt Schilling Is Once Again Left Out

The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame class of 2018 was revealed Wednesday and one name was once again left out despite an obvious Hall of Fame resume that includes being one of the greatest postseason pitchers of all time.

The problem? The former player in question is none other than former Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling who has essentially been blacked from Cooperstown over his so-called controversial views which are largely mainstream conservative viewpoints with a bit of sarcastic flare.

Schilling, who now works for Breitbart News, was actually fired by ESPN a few years back after he posted a meme that questioned a controversial transgender bathroom law.

At this point it is so obvious that Schilling is being left out of the Hall of Fame for being a conservative that even writers for the now openly liberal ESPN are admitting this sad fact.

Two years ago, Curt Schilling was 11 percent ahead of Mike Mussina in the voting. Now Mussina is 12 percent ahead and trending in the right direction while Schilling has stalled.

Both are very strong candidates in my opinion, well above the bar for Hall of Fame pitchers, especially when considering Schilling’s postseason numbers. You have to think Schilling’s controversial political views have hurt him at the ballot box.

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Curt Schilling made some progress this time around, but he has a longer road ahead of him at 51.3 percent.

You have to wonder how much the furor over Schilling’s politics and social media activity has set him back on his route to Cooperstown.

An article in Sports Illustrated also makes clear that it is highly likely that Schilling is being left out of the Hall of Fame for being a Trump supporter who shared a couple of memes on Twitter that some considered offensive.

Keep in mind that mainstream news writers vote for the Hall of Fame and we already know that 99% of the mainstream press are against the president.

In the years since his retirement, his actions and inflammatory rhetoric on social media have turned him from a merely controversial and polarizing figure to one who continues to create problems for himself.

Normally, that wouldn’t be germane to the Hall of Fame discussion, but his promotion of a tweet promoting the lynching of journalists during the tense 2016 presidential campaign brought his momentum to a screeching halt.

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Schilling’s politics have been a significant part of his public persona going back to when he stumped for George W. Bush on Good Morning America just hours after the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, an unpopular move in a state that voted heavily for Massachusetts senator John Kerry during that year’s presidential election. But to the point that he surpassed the 50% threshold in voting, his candidacy had withstood numerous controversies and efforts to alienate voters, including but not limited to:

• His longstanding public feuds with high-profile writers such as ESPN’s Pedro Gomez, Newsday’s Jon Heyman and the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy.

• The demise of his videogame company, 38 Studios, which received a $75 million loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation to relocate from Massachusetts but went bankrupt and laid off its staff of 379 people without notice, violating federal law. The state of Rhode Island filed suit and recouped just $16.9 million in two partial settlements.

• A fall 2015 suspension from his job as an ESPN analyst for posting a Twitter meme that compared Muslim extremists to German Nazis.

• His January 2015 claim (later repeated) that his conservative political views were costing him votes.

That last claim was belied by back-to-back double-digit gains on the 2015 and ’16 ballots. Despite his surge, Schilling continued to run afoul of ESPN until being fired in April 2016 for “unacceptable” conduct stemming from his posting of an offensive Facebook meme about transgender bathroom laws, and his publicly commenting on the 2016 presidential election. While nobody should be content with an employer suppressing his public expression, employment in such a high-profile job within the Disney empire doesn’t come without certain expectations and conditions that Schilling repeatedly chose to violate.

Schilling’s rhetoric grew increasingly inflammatory after his firing. On Twitter, days before the 2016 presidential election, he praised a photo showing a pro-Donald Trump t-shirt that advocated lynching; “So much awesome here,” he said of a shirt that read, “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”

While Schilling later claimed his comments were “sarcasm,” by that point, several BBWAA voters proclaimed that they were withdrawing their support of Schilling’s candidacy at least for 2017, citing the same character clause that many voters use to justify not voting for players connected to PED use.

Wrote former BBWAA president Susan Slusser, “I’ve voted for him previously. But seems to me like advocating murder goes against character clause.” Wrote another former BBWAA president, Jose de Jesus Ortiz, “[P]roposing lynching pretty much sinks his chance on my ballot on character clause.” Wrote Shaughnessy, “[Schilling] has transitioned from a mere nuisance to an actual menace to society.” Said Heyman in a radio interview, “There is a line there to me and he crossed that line by espousing lynching.”

In other words, Schilling hurt the all powerful mainstream media’s feelings so they are going to punish an obvious Hall of Fame player year after year after year.

Although Schilling being left out of the Hall of Fame for any reason is a joke if you follow the sport, for those that do not this still remains an important story as it is an example of yet another person being blackballed within his or her industry for being conservative and, even worse, a Trump supporter.

There remains no doubt that there is a growing movement within the liberal media, sometimes spearheaded by the likes of Media Matters and other times by baseball hall of fame writers, to blackball any high-profile figure who happens to support Donald Trump and or refuses to bow to the mainstream media as the arbitrators of truth in America.