Curt Schilling

Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling joined Dennis & Callahan Friday morning and discussed how he would have reacted to the most recent issue in the Red Sox clubhouse regarding Bobby Valentine and Will Middlebrooks. To listen to the interview, visit the Dennis & Callahan audio on demand page.

Valentine told Middlebrooks “Nice inning, kid” after an inning in which he recorded two errors, something Schilling said he would have taken exception to.

“Listen, I can tell you that as a player, that’s a swing,” Schilling said. “I’m taking a swing at that comment. And I’m not talking about just Bobby – if anybody – Bobby is different. He runs and beats to a different drummer.

However, while Schilling disagreed with the way Valentine handled the situation with Middlebrooks, he said there is a different issue that is revealed through this story.

“What that tells me is you clearly have a player or players or a coach who wants [Valentine] to have no part in this organization,” Schilling said. “The bigger issue for me is that – and I’ve had a conversation, not like that, but if I had to have a conversation like that about my manager, I would have had it with my manager. To think that that coach or that person thinks so little of him to go to the front office, that is a whole different set of issues that exists.”

Schilling also talked about his chances at the hall of fame, as he will be inducted into the Red Sox hall of fame before Friday night’s game. The four-time World Series champion said that he does not know how playing during the steroid era will affect his chances at the hall of fame.

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Schilling said. “It will be interesting, I guess, in the sense that most of the guys that are up there in recognition or achievement that I’m on the ballot with initially cheated. And I didn’t. I don’t know what that is going to mean or what it means. I guess it’s a source of pride in a sense for me though, to look at that and to understand, to be able to look at my boys and make them understand. I got kicked around a little bit, but I played the game clean. Not all of the guys on this ballot can say that.”

The steroid era has appeared to have hindered the chances of some players, such as Jeff Bagwell, at the hall of fame due to mere suspicion of performance enhancing drug use. However, Schilling said that it’s the players’ fault in the end.

“As much as players want to cry – at the end of the day it’s our fault. We could have done something about it and we didn’t. We had the ability to do something about it and we didn’t. We had an inkling or we knew, and we failed to act and it cost us.”

“We had players like Rick Helling and others who stood up very early in the process and stood up and said ‘This has got to stop.’ I think a lot of people, I think they were either like me and were like, ‘Come on, you’re making a bigger deal out of it than it really is,’ or you were cheating and you wanted him to sit down and shut up. There was a bury your heads in the sand mentality amongst the players that didn’t have a clue. And then there was the owners who wanted nobody to talk about it because people were coming through the turnstiles in record numbers.”