Curt Schilling says a lot of things even he knows are stupid, but this time, he had a point. The retired MLB pitcher called out Twitter trolls who made incredibly disgusting comments about his only daughter, Gabby.
Back on Feb. 25, Schilling happily told his Twitter followers that Gabby was going to pitch for her college softball team, the Salve Regina Seahawks. He was expecting some nice responses, since there was nothing particularly controversial about that. But instead, he got people sending him sexually explicit comments.
In a lengthy blog post, Schilling outed the two men who posted the most disgusting comments, Adam Nagel and Sean MacDonald. He noted that other tweets included comments about rape, bloody underwear and other vulgar words.
“I was a jock my whole life. I played sports my whole life. Baseball since I was 5 until I retired at 41. I know clubhouses. I lived in a dorm. I get it. Guys will be guys. Guys will say dumb crap, often. But I can’t ever remember, drunk, in a clubhouse, with best friends, with anyone, ever speaking like this to someone,” Schilling wrote.
According to NJ.com, both MacDonald and Nagel have had their Twitter accounts disabled. MacDonald actually had a part-time job with the New York Yankees as a ticket seller, but has since been fired.
Schilling ended his blog post with a note to his daughter, apologizing. “But as we have talked about, there is no situation ever in your life, where it’s ok for any ‘man’ to talk about you, or any other woman this way (and truth be told no real man would ever talk this way anyway),” he wrote in part. “It truly is time this stopped. I don’t know where it started because it sure as hell didn’t happen much when we were growing up.”
Schilling played for the Red Sox, Phillies and Diamondbacks during his long career and currently works as an ESPN analyst. He appeared on Dan Patrick’s show this morning to explain why he had to speak out against Twitter trolls.
screenshot from ESPN YouTube video