The Case of the Bloody (sic) Sock
Posted on April 27th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
The Times reports on the controversy that is sweeping the baseball world: Whether Curt Schilling painted his sock red to make it look like he was bleeding while pitching against the Yankees in the 2004 championship series.
Doug Mirabelli now says he was being sarcastic when he said the “blood” was actually paint.
Johnny Damon, another 2004 teammate of Schillingâs, said, âAs far as I know, itâs authentic.â Then, he smiled.
I do like that Johnny Damon…..
Looks to me like the blood is real. But then, I’ve always thought that, while Schilling deserved much credit for pitching a great game under tough circumstances, the business about the blood was over-hyped. So you bleed a little? Who cares? I once got kicked in the face playing soccer against, um, Harvard. I got a nosebleed but kept playing; my white shirt looked like a Jackson Pollock in red. It looked macho, but it wasn’t really reflective of pain.
Now, football players whose uniforms get stained with bloodâthat’s toughness…..
The Schilling sock:
Actually kind of nasty.
8 Responses
4/27/2007 10:02 am
I know you’re just having fun with this since, but is our cynicism so deep that we actually give credence to this absurd claim? Guess it’s better than talking about how crappy the 200 million dollar Yankees are.
What Schilling did that day was unbelievably gutsy. He put his career in jeopardy to pitch that Game 6 against the Yankees. Media whore or not, Schilling is a warrior and one of the best post-season performers of all time. As a baseball fan, you should respect that.
4/27/2007 10:20 am
Yeah, that’s not paint on the sock. Game set match.
Too bad though, cause I’m proud of my pun:
If the allegations had proven to be true, Schilling would have been yet another Republican hero who turns out to have feet of Klee.
Standing Eagle
4/27/2007 5:57 pm
forget the sock focus on the steriods that the rest of baseball is using
get a real issue.
4/28/2007 4:10 pm
You whiffed this one, Rich, I’m afraid-and I’m usually pulling you, at least with the sports reporting.
The difference between Schilling’s blood and your blood is that your worst-case scenario was a more busted nose, perhaps a crooked beak? Join about a quarter of the male population. His sutures were left intentionally loose to allow for a little play in that region of his ankle. The downside was a ripped tendon, whatever, something that might not be undone. The sheer nerve it took to keep pushing and sticking those cleats is pretty damn inspiring, certainly in the context of sporting activities. A nosebleed, you are correct, does not a (sports) hero make, but the analogy is ill-fitting.
Squatting Egret
4/28/2007 4:17 pm
Standing Eagle,
No question, Schilling was gutsy. But having spent the last year or so researching players from past decades, I think that what he did wouldn’t have been such a big deal in a tougher decade, which is to say, pretty much any other decade in baseball.
4/29/2007 8:22 am
Yeah Rich. Old-time players used to have experimental procedures done all the time just to pitch in a game. And when you were a youngster you had to walk 5 miles just to get to school.
4/29/2007 8:31 am
They may not have had the experimental procedures, but they were just as tough, and there wasn’t such a big deal made of it. Butch Hobson used to have to rearrange the bone chips in his elbow before games, so that the joint wouldn’t completely lock up on him in the middle of a throw. How did he do that? By rearranging the pieces of bone floating around his right elbow with his left hand….
Thurman Munson used to catch with stitches in the fingers of his throwing hand…
And, of course, Lou Gehrig played quite a few games when he was visibly suffering (but as yet undiagnosed) from ALS, and so fragile that he’d fall rounding a base….
Don Zimmer came back from one beanball that put him in a coma for two weeks and another that almost detached his retina.
And so on.
Again, nothing I said is intended to detract from Schilling’s gutsy play, just to suggest that it’s really only against the modern backdrop of wimps like Carl Pavano that such gutsiness stands out.
4/30/2007 12:17 am
Let me take advantage of this vaguely related thread to proclaim my delight at the Sox taking another series from the Yanks. I’m sure that the Yankees be in the division race to the end, but for now I feel comfortable in the truth of the age-old Sox chant: Yankees Suck!