For certain sects of Major League Baseball fandom, there are few figures quite as mythic or legendary as Curt Schilling.
The longtime MLB ace, who has played for a number of teams over his illustrious career, is perhaps best known for the 2004 “bloody sock” game, wherein Schilling pitched a dominant game despite recovering from ankle surgery. In subsequent replays of the game, you can clearly see a red blotch on Schilling’s sock grow larger as the game went on.
Oh, and there was also the not-so-insignificant fact that Schilling’s bloody sock game came during a historic playoff comeback, as Schilling and the Boston Red Sox completed the first-ever comeback from a 3-0 series deficit in MLB history (a feat that still hasn’t been accomplished in the NBA.) And it also happened to be at the expense of the hated Red Sox rivals, the New York Yankees.
Point being: Curt Schilling knows and loves baseball, a sport in which he has reached the highest possible levels. His thoughts on the sport are not the bitter ramblings of a has-been or never-was — they’re insight from a man embedded in the annals of baseball lore.
So it’s with that preface that baseball should listen long and hard to what Schilling has to say about the current state of the MLB product.
Curt Schilling appeared on Saturday’s episode of “Jesse Watters Primetime” to discuss a litany of topics, but he honed in on one particularly feisty cultural battleground: Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
For the unaware, the Dodgers have found themselves squarely in the eye of a storm when it invited, then dis-invited, and then re-invited a mentally disturbed group of blasphemers known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” (If you’re morbidly curious, you can go to this article to see a video of the SPI’s “performances,” but be warned — this stuff is genuinely grotesque and sickening.)
That debacle, in turn, led to all manner of protests, counter-protests, arguments and debates about whether or not the Dodgers were in the wrong. Spoiler alert: Yes, they were.
For Schilling, this stunt and disastrous fallout were emblematic of so much of the LGBT movement. Namely, why are businesses and conglomerates bending over so backward, into literal sin sometimes, for such a small subset of the American population?
You can watch Schilling’s poignant and pertinent remarks below:
@gehrig38 (Curt Schilling)
?I don’t know where the rubber is going to meet the road because it’s a true sacrifice. You look at the guys, the young men that signed the Constitution and all the things that they sacrificed, everything to come out from under a tyrannical… pic.twitter.com/qzSMqug6Zk— ? Eagle Wings ? (@CRRJA5) June 17, 2023
“It’s amazing to me, Jesse, that guys that are billionaires can’t do math,” Schilling explained. “Because what do you think? Let’s say there’s 10,000 trans people in [Los Angeles.] I think [that figure] is probably pushing it.
“And there’s what, 1.3 billion Catholics in the world? You know, ‘Let’s not offend the offensive group, and let’s make sure that we cater to a crowd of people who literally, after tonight, will never step foot in Dodger Stadium again … and then we can offend 1.3 billion Catholics in the meantime.”
And that’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? For businessmen and entrepreneurs who have been so successful in their lives that they can afford a professional sports franchise, why can’t they figure out simple math?
So you’ve jumped on the rainbow bandwagon and celebrated your tokenized perception of “pride.” Great. Now what?
As Schilling alluded to, how many drag queens in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence actually like baseball? How many of those blasphemers could tell you what an RBI is, or whether closing pitchers are overrated? How many of them could even name a current Dodger not named Clayton Kershaw?
Probably not many. And while that answer is far from proven science, you don’t need to look much further than actual math to figure out how inane these “pride” celebrations are.
According to a 2022 Gallup poll, 7.1 percent of American adults identified as LGBT.
Conversely, a 2019 study from Ohio University found that a meager 14.1 percent of American adults picked baseball as their favorite sport.
You don’t need to be a rocket surgeon to know that 14 percent of 7 percent is an infinitesimally tiny figure.
Is it really worth angering swaths of Christians and Catholics (heck, even Muslims and Buddhists would probably recoil in horror at cross-dressing men giving a crucified Jesus Christ a lapdance) for a moment of “pride” that, after June 30, 2023, wouldn’t be tolerated by anyone with a modicum of sanity?
If you’re the Dodgers, retail titan Target or beleaguered beer Bud Light, the answer is apparently a resounding “yes.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
