Curt Schilling Big on Twitter but Short on Memory in Attacking A's Fans
When he was on the mound from 2001-04, Curt Schilling was on top of the world.
He won 20 games three times and was on World Series championship teams in Arizona in 2001 and Boston in 2004.
The so-called “bloody sock” he wore became a prime focus of the 2004 postseason and went on to become the stuff of legend. One of the two socks is in Cooperstown.
Since his retirement, however, Schilling has become legendary in quite another way, as the purveyor of extreme right-wing views and as someone not afraid to speak his mind.
He’s been doing that on Twitter (he’s @Gehrig38) for more than a decade now, and in the last couple of days he’s come back to some his favorite targets: The Oakland A’s fans and the place they call home, the Oakland Coliseum.
Prompted by a rather innocuous question about what his favorite stadiums were, he sent out a series of tweets, Along the way, he trashed the Coliseum.
“The stadium was poop salad, and then tac (sic) on the worst most disrespectful fans in sports,” he wrote.
Later he added on that he wasn’t “being a dick about it. They were the worst fans in the game. I’m not talking about ragging and talking trash. That makes fans good; they were just bad fans. They said (expletive) that had nothing to do with the game or you as a player and they were bitter as hell.”
They must have been. Schilling recorded his 3,000 career strikeout in the Coliseum in 2006, and the fans there gave him a prolonged standing ovation, long enough that he said at the time it made him uncomfortable.
After that Aug. 30, 2006 game, he twice said he was “humbled.”
“Hats off to the Oakland A’s fans for recognizing it,” he was quoted at the time. “I’m very humbled by the fact that their fans recognized it and the Sox fans were here. You certainly don’t expect that on the road. It was kind of uncomfortable, because there’s a game going on, and you want to acknowledge the people, but you don’t want to make it bigger than the situation.
“I was very honored that they did that. It was a very, very classy thing to do.”
When Twitter threw that at him this weekend, Schilling acted as if it never really happened. Fake news, if you will.
“95% of those standing (of the 12,0000 in the park) were Sox Nation,” Schilling tweeted.
He might have been a top-flight pitcher, but he’s no math whiz. It was a Wednesday day crowd of more than 31,000 that rose up and saluted him after Nick Swisher became strikeout victim No. 3,000.
That must be why he posted this tweet the other day:
“They weren’t actual sports fans,” he wrote. “They just yelled the dumbest (stuff) and acted like idiots.”
Yeah, right.