Curt Schilling can't shut up, so he had to be shut down.
ESPN is taking the microphone out his hand for the rest of the baseball season. And before visions of Muslims, Hitler and political correctness start a 5-alarm fire in your belly, take a deeeeeep breath and repeat after me:
It had nothing to do with the content of Schilling's infamous tweet last week.
You know, the one with a picture of the Fuhrer giving the old Sieg Heil salute with a caption comparing Muslim extremists to Nazis.
Schilling was suspended because he doesn't know when to stop throwing heat.
ESPN had asked him to stop with the controversial Twitter posts before his Muslim observation. Schilling couldn't resist his tweeting urge, so the network initially suspended him for the Little League World Series.
He was due to return next week, then he took umbrage to how the website Awful Announcing (AA) reported the Muslin/Nazi tweet. Schilling sent a long and somewhat profane email to AA.
He didn't just berate the site, he dragged ESPN NFL insider Chris Mortensen into the fray. Mortensen caught a lot of heat for passing along faulty info on Deflategate. Schilling said the AA reporter did not accurately report the Nazi tweet.
"Very Chris Mortensen of you," he wrote.
That may well have been true, but it wasn't the point.
After telling an employee to please stop making controversial headlines, the last thing ESPN needed to was to see said employee making more controversial headlines. Especially when he rips a fellow employee in the process.
"Chris Mortensen's journalistic integrity is called into question by Curt Schilling," was how the New York Daily News reported it.
I like how Schilling stirs things up, but I don't run ESPN. What would you have done if he were your employee?
The pitcher who made a bloody sock famous had been continually warned. Schilling vowed to stop bringing unwanted controversy to his company.
Then he went out and did it again. That stubbornness was great when he was pitching through pain in the World Series.
It's not so great when it runs up against the expressed wishes of the corporate suits.
"Curt's actions have not been consistent with his contractual obligations nor have they been professionally handled; they have obviously not reflected well on the company," ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said.
I asked hypothetically what you would have done if you were Schilling's boss. To most people, the answer is based on a false assumption.
If you're liberal, you'd say Schilling should be suspended, if not sent to Gitmo, because he said Muslims are like Nazis.
If you're conservative, you'd say Schilling just spoke the truth and ESPN has become so P.C. it should hire Rachel Maddow as its main SportsCenter anchor.
Both sides have spent the past week exchanging insults and position papers on the accuracy or inaccuracy of Schilling's original tweet. The media hasn't helped since it largely characterized the content of the tweet as the issue.
"Curt Schilling done for the season at ESPN due to Hitler tweets," was the L.A. Times headline.
ESPN insists it wasn't due to what was in the tweet. Schilling is done because he disobeyed an order.
That said, ESPN rarely acts when an employee tweets something that upsets liberals. That's partially because it so rarely happens.
If that leads you to believe Schilling's punishment is all based on politics, I can't prove otherwise. I'll even grant that was the case with the first tweet.
But after being slapped down for that, Schilling said, "Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part."
So what did he do?
He went out and made the same decision.
No wonder ESPN told him to put a sock in it.
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