Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Curt With You

If you'll be seeing the Red Sox play in a city other than Boston this season, please click here.

Yesterday on CSTB someone left a comment about Curt Schilling's blog. He said that he'd commented on Curt's "stupid blog," saying something to the effect of "Curt Schilling is a right-wing Jesus freak who should shut up and pitch." Well, I can assure you I gave him the slow, sarcastic applause on that one. Seriously, terrible job on that, on unoriginality alone. But aside from that, let's take a closer look at Curt's blog. I've read almost the whole thing, from day one, and I can tell you that A. It's not stupid and B. It's not about politics or religion. (If anything, you could make fun of the fact that he talks about his video game company a little, uh, much.)

The point is, though, he's doing his blog to talk about his pitching. To give us insight. And it's really in-depth. If you've decided to pass it off as "Curt's Jesus Site," please give it a read. If you're interested in pitching, from the actual big league pitcher's perspective, you won't be disappointed.

I will also say that the guy has every right to spout off about why his religion is right, and that Bush is the king of America, and even that the Yankees rule and he wishes he pitched for them instead of us. On his own blog. None of us are forced to read it. But guess what--he doesn't do any of this. At all! When he's asked about religion or politics, he answers, and does it in a respectful way.

I'm a far left-winger and a 99% atheist. (While I don't believe in a higher power, I do admit that I don't know if one or many exist. I guess that makes me an agnostic. But, whatever, I just live my life and try to avoid labels and mainly try to be kind to the other creatures around me. Except for the creatures in section 39 in Yankee Stadium. They can go to hell. If it exists.) But I am able to read Curt's blog with no problem. In fact, I do more railing against the right-wing on my blog than he does against the left--which, again, is none at all! He focuses on baseball, I'm telling you. Try reading it.

Recently, he answered a question and it kind of sums his attitude toward all of this up. I leave you with it:

"Q-Curt, I wanted to add that I am a liberal and not Christian, so we disagree on certain issues, but I certainly respect your views, as I’m sure you’d respect mine.

A-I’d really like to address these two topics one time, and not have us do it again. I honest to God could care less what your political affiliation is. I also think you should care less what mine is. I don’t and haven’t ever voted ‘party lines’. I vote for the person I believe is the best candidate. If you vote for someone because someone told you to or someone you like voted for them, you’re an idiot. We’re in a quagmire right now politically. From local elections on up it seems to me that we vote for the person we DISLIKE the least, instead of the best candidate, and that sucks. But because you disagree with my political views is totally irrelevant to me unless you and I are discussing politics, and this isn’t a forum to do that. I will also add that my profession, like yours, has nothing to do with my political insight or opinions. If you think I’d vote for a president because his policy is going to lower my taxes you’re stupid.

As far as being a Christian goes, I’ll just tell you that it’s been the single biggest life changing thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m not going to tell you how to or why to, or even that you should. I’ll answer questions from people, regardless of their religious beliefs, when they ask me about my Faith.

And as far as CHBs column that ran roughshod over me and the people coming here let me say this. Obviously, like anyone, I sincerely appreciate the well wishes, the thank you’s and the support. I didn’t start doing this to get an outpouring of back pats and hand shakes. Life has been more than great to me to this point and there are a lot more deserving people than me in this world that could be living my dream. If that bothers you then I would tell you that the problems you have are yours and yours alone. If someone wishing someone else well, or thanking them, is something that gives you problems, or makes you mad, then you’ve got a lot bigger problems than this one.

If that’s not acceptable or a problem then as I stated very early on, don’t come here. You come here by choice and it’s appreciated when it leads to you learning something about the game, ALS, Shade or whatever, and I appreciate the Q&A when it comes to 38 Studios, Baseball, whatever. I started doing this because of the unfiltered and open forum it provides to talk about the things I like to do. I don’t go out of my way to talk to people I don’t respect or like, why would you? I don’t moderate the comments here, other than to delete the vulgar sophmoric posts that have nothing to add. I don’t delete posts that are rants and what not, about me or what people think of me. To date the site has had almost 900,000 viewers, and almost 2000 posted comments. I’ve had to delete 23 posts for content, the rest are there for everyone to see."

Comments:
Now wait a minute Jere. You just wrote this -

"The point is, though, he's doing his blog to talk about his pitching".

What?

Didn't he just break some news on ANOTHER pitcher in the organization BEFORE it was officially announced?

Sure he apologized, but that's what turns me off about Schilling. Most of the time he doesn't think before he speaks...and when he does...it's mostly to boost his ego.

I've read his blog. Does he have interesting things to say about pitching? Yes.

I just hope he keeps it that way.
 
From Curt himself:

"P.S. Just an FYI, the story wasn’t “Broke” here, whether you heard it here first or not, it was broken by ESPN. “Breaking news” is not a goal here, hell there isn’t any goal here other than to talk baseball, 38 Studios and do some cool stuff for the Charities that are linked as well as legitimate charities that bloggers who post here are involved in. So put away the conspiracy theories, as fun as they may be."

I know what you mean about him opening his mouth a lot. I'm no huge fan of the off-the-field Schilling in general. You say he doesn't think before he speaks, and I've heard evidence of this. But this is his blog. He's got time to think before he types and presses the publish button. (Or pays some other person to do it.) So, again, I say give him the benefit of the doubt on this project. From what he's written on it, I've yet to see evidence of attempted ego-boosting, religious or political conversion. The blatant promotion of his company, annoying, sure.
 
New Schilling t-shirts are on sale now at SBF...

His new blog is interesting when he's telling you who throws the best versions of pitches, or relaying "insider" stories like his battle with Millar last week. The 38Studios bit is wearing thin, though...and in all (undue) fairness to CHB, there is a lot of sucking up on there. Not enough to warrant such a vindictive, jealous screed as the one in the Globe, but still...some of it is sycophantic.
 
I read your post--that answer he gives in the interview had me laughing my ass off.

About the sucking up, you gotta admit, it's kind of a new experience for everyone. You're siting there typing, knowing, Curt's gonna read this. It's like some kind of colliding of worlds, that CHB doesn't understand because he's been hanging around ballplayers for years. Of course some of the commoners are gonna be wide-eyed. I know I was the time Curt commented on Joy of Sox.

I hope we get past all that soon and the comments section there turns into something more what we're used to, with everyone free to just relax and write what they feel instead of feeling the need to have Curt aprove of everything they do.
 
Thanks for the reply Jere. I did want to point out though that Schilling DID apologize to Francona -

Globe Extra Bases 3/23

"Francona said that Curt Schilling apologized to him for breaking the news on Papelbon's conversion to closer in his blog".

Why would he apologize if it was just a "conspiracy theory"?

That's what bother me about Schilling, contradiction.
 
Cool, brutha. This may be one of those things that never really gets officially solved. But I'll just say this: He very well may do his usual "say too much" act. I guess that's just his personality. But I didn't hear people saying "I don't wanna read his blog, he'll probably just say a bunch of crap that gets him in trouble." Like I said, he could do that anyway. Now that I think of it, he has done stuff like name his all-time team--which is bound to piss off every teammate he doesn't name. What I did hear were people assuming his blog would be a Jesus/Republican fest, which, while that's his choice if wants to, it hasn't been at all.

If the stuff about blabbing too much bothers you, like it does a lot of people, yeah, that part of it could make you want him to shut up, as we all probably have thought about the dude before.

As long as it's mainly a blog that discusses his pitching from a perspective we can't get anywhere else, I'll have no problem reading it. Besides, like with any other blog, you can read what you want, and ignore the rest. I'm guessing a lot of people do that with my blog, heh.
 
Jere said -

"Besides, like with any other blog, you can read what you want, and ignore the rest. I'm guessing a lot of people do that with my blog, heh."

I know I do. But I still think your blog is bad-ass. Good work man.
 
Thanks. Glad you like the parts you, uh, like.
 
"I'm not huge fan of the off-the-field Schilling in general."

I couldn't disagree more on this one tiny sentence, and it's probably a bit unfair to Jere to quote him on that one thing because that wasn't really his point and I think from what he wrote he probably agrees mostly.

I think I'm a bigger fan of the off-the-field Schilling than I am of the on-the-field Schilling. I haven't seen any athlete as interested in the community they live in or as involved in it as Curt Schilling. The people that can't separate his religious and political views from the equation are really not looking at things the right way.

I live in Medfield, so I have a different viewpoint on this one, but that family continually does stuff for the town and for people in the town, and his ALS campaign is ubiquitous throughout the town (try going to our Supermarket for example). I'm convinced he truly cares, rather than other athletes who do things for PR.

Also, there's no athlete that "gets" electronic media (blogs/message boards/etc) more than Curt Schilling. I'm pretty confident that his blog is going to continue to be interesting, and it's nice that he's out from behind the iron curtain of SoSH. I wish more athletes were that open, it would make for interesting reading.
 
Stuff like his charity work and his blog make me a fan. It's the past promoting of Bush and him saying stuff that ends up hurting teammates or whatever that make the fandom stay away from the "huge" category for me. I guess.
 
When I first read Schilling's blog, I thought, 'Whaaat? This is so stupid!"

I don't really read it, probably won't until the noise dies down, but it's not stupid. It's really just a decent blog written by a baseball insider... to the X-TREME!!
 

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