We recently mentioned Joe Buck’s new autobiography. Today Vice has an excerpt of it that you may find amusing.
In Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, Curt Schilling was taken out of the game by Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly. Brenly was mic’d up by the Fox production team and Schilling famously pleaded with Brenly to keep him in the game because he still had something left and “gamer/gritty/competitor/warrior blah, blah, blah” stuff that Schilling was known for as a player.
You may remember what happened next: the Yankees rallied off of reliever Byung-Hyun Kim to force extras and then Derek Jeter hit his famous 10th inning homer off of him. Brenly caught all kinds of hell afterward for taking Schilling out, no doubt made more severe due to Schilling’s protestations, picked up on a live mic.
Buck, however, says that that was all show. Schilling had told his catcher, Damien Miller, before the inning that he was out of gas, had one more inning at best and that Miller should not let Brenly leave Schilling in. Miller told Brenly this, so Brenly naturally came to take Schilling out when he ran into trouble. From the book:
“It was great theater. It belonged on Broadway.
Here is what we didn’t know. Earlier in that inning, Schilling had told his catcher, Damian Miller, that he was running out of gas: ‘Whatever happens, this is my last inning. Don’t let him put me back out there again.’ Naturally, Miller told Brenly.
But Schilling could see the microphone on Brenly’s uniform. He knew he would look better if he begged to keep pitching on national television. So he asked Brenly to keep him the game…They both knew he was coming out.”
As Vice’s Twitter account notes, this probably is reason enough to make one question the whole bloody sock business anew.
