Curt Schilling, the ESPN "Sunday Night Baseball" analyst and former major league pitcher, was pulled from calling a Little League World Series game Tuesday night because of a post he shared on his Twitter account that suggested extremist Muslims were comparable to Nazis. The post featured an image of Adolf Hitler.
Although he has been contributing to ESPN's Little League World Series coverage, Tuesday night's broadcast was to be his first as a game analyst.
"Curt's tweet was completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company's perspective," ESPN said in a statement. "We made that point very strongly to Curt and have removed him from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration."
Schilling quickly deleted the post and apologized on Twitter, saying: "I understand and accept my suspension. 100% my fault. Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part."
Robert O. Trestan, the New England director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that "we are glad that he realized how his tweet offended Muslims and Jews," but added that the analogy he made has "no place in civil debate."
"As horrible as the acts committed by Islamic extremists are, comparing this to state-controlled genocide committed by the Nazis is disgusting," Trestan said.
No ESPN officials were available to say if they would impose further discipline on Schilling, such as suspending him from future Sunday night games.
Schilling is the second on-air personality reprimanded by ESPN in recent days. Cris Carter, an NFL studio analyst, was found in a 2014 rookie symposium video to have advised young players to "have a fall guy in your crew" if any of them found themselves in legal trouble.
"We completely disagree with his remarks and we have made that extremely clear to him," ESPN said in a statement. Carter apologized, saying, "I can't make an excuse for what my mind-set was."
Schilling is active on Twitter and Facebook, where his accounts are filled with baseball talk, biblical references, pro-military and anti-abortion messages, and conservative political statements that are frequently punctuated by sharing memes. On Facebook, he has numerous photographs of Nazi and Third Reich memorabilia that are parts of his World War II collection.
Months ago, he said that he had started selling some of it "due to space issues."
Earlier this year, he used the Internet to aggressively protect his daughter, Gabby, from vulgar comments posted by cyberbullies on Twitter. In defending his actions, he wrote on his blog about himself: "I have a nasty habit of talking, a lot, about anything anyone asks me and totally unconcerned about giving you my opinion. You will never question where I stand, right or wrong agree or disagree on anything."
He is also known for the bankruptcy in 2012 of his video game company, 38 Studios, that left Rhode Island taxpayers liable for the bonds it had issued to help him expand.
Schilling, 48, joined ESPN in 2010 and was added as a "Sunday Night Baseball" analyst in late 2013. Before the start of the 2014 season, he was found to have mouth cancer that he said had been caused by chewing tobacco. In a letter to his younger self posted this year on The Players' Tribune, Schilling wrote this warning: "You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell. You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums -- they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life."
Sports on 08/26/2015