Curt Schilling Allegedly Pulled The Ultimate Snake Move During The 2001 World Series To Make Himself Look Tough

Curt Schilling is a certified lunatic. It amazes me how this dude is a six-time All-Star and three-time World Series champion because I now equate him to my uncle whose “in between jobs” and has had one too many cocktails at Thanksgiving.

Maybe his lunacy was suppressed during his playing career or unemployment turned him into a conspiracy theorist troll, but I didn’t really understand the depths of his insanity until post-retirement. Former Philadelphia Phillies general manager Ed Wade, on the other hand, once said of Schilling  “he was a horse every five days and a horse’s ass the other four,” according to Vice. So I stand corrected.

Vice mined out a particularly LOL-worthy story out of broadcaster Joe Buck’s new book Lucky Bastard that paints Curt Schilling as a glory-hound fraud.

During the 2001 World Series, FOX convinced then Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly to wear a mic in the dugout. During Game Four on Halloween, in the Bronx with the Diamondbacks are up 2-1, Schilling pitched brilliantly on just three days rest, giving up just three hits and one run through seven innings.

Fox aired video of Bob Brenly and Curt Schilling arguing as Brenly decided to put Byung-Hyun Kim on the mound for the last six outs. But, it was all a load of shit played out by Schilling.

Here is what we didn’t know. Earlier in that inning, Schilling had told his catcher, Damian Miller, that he was running out of gas: ‘Whatever happens, this is my last inning. Don’t let him put me back out there again.’ Naturally, Miller told Brenly.

But Schilling could see the microphone on Brenly’s uniform. He knew he would look better if he begged to keep pitching on national television. So he asked Brenly to keep him the game…They both knew he was coming out.”

If you don’t recall, the first ever November World Series game ended in the tenth on a Derek Jeter home run off Kim, after he’d coughed one up to Tino Martinez in the ninth. Back to Buck’s story:

“Brenly got lots of heat for pulling Schilling against his will—the whole country had heard Schilling protest in the dugout. But Brenly couldn’t call out one of his aces for being a glory hound. He had to take the heat, and he did—with a great sense of humor.

‘You fucking guys,’ [Brenly] said with a laugh the next time we saw him. ‘You made me look like the bad guy. Never again!’ he thought it was hilarious.”

Schilling took to Twitter to retort Joe Buck’s account.

There is no way that wasn’t Heinz ketchup on Schilling’s sock during Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS. And that’s coming from a Red Sox fan.

[h/t Vice]

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Matt’s love of writing was born during a sixth grade assembly when it was announced that his essay titled “Why Drugs Are Bad” had taken first prize in D.A.R.E.’s grade-wide contest. The anti-drug people gave him a $50 savings bond for his brave contribution to crime-fighting, and upon the bond’s maturity 10 years later, he used it to buy his very first bag of marijuana.