ESPN analyst and former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling says his conservative politics have kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
In a radio interview
with Boston radio station WEEI, Schilling complained the Hall of Fame voting "process isn't flawed," but the people who cast the votes are.
"[S]tupid people do stupid things," Schilling said. "I’ve seen so many in the past, voters making their vote into a news article, protesting this or protesting that, except just voting the player on his playing merits. And that’s normal, I guess, because we’re human, we all have bias, we all have prejudice."
Schilling got 39.2 percent of the latest Hall of Fame vote, well short of the 75 percent needed for election. Four players were elected; Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, Craig Biggio and Pedro Martinez.
He said Smoltz deserved to be enshrined: "He's a Hall of Famer," Schilling said.
“And I think the other big thing is that I think he’s a Democrat and so I know that, as a Republican, that there’s some people that really don’t like that," he said.
Schilling has been outspoken in his support for Republican candidates,
the radio station points out, and Schilling contends he would have gotten more votes had he been less so.
"Listen, when human beings do something, anything, there’s bias and prejudice," he said.
"Nine percent of the voters did not vote for Pedro. There’s something wrong with the process and some of the people in the process when that happens. I don’t think that it kept me [out] or anything like that, but I do know that there are guys who probably won’t ever vote for me because of the things that I said or did. That’s the way it works.”
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