On one hand, Curt Schilling doesn't deserve the time of day and there are thousands of more important things to opine on. On the other hand, the baseball hall of fame is a pet interest of mine and I feel like I have something unique (?) to say about it that cuts to the core of the matter. So let's make a deal: I will write this brief post and then never talk about Curt Schilling here or anywhere else ever again.
Curt Schilling is one of the thirty or so best pitchers in the history of the game. He is also an obviously despicable person. A holistic evaluation of this and everything else that goes into his hall of fame worthiness is best laid out here. While I appreciate the detail and understand the reasoning behind that evaluation, I come to the opposite conclusion: Schilling should be in the hall of fame.
The reason for this is mostly that I do not care to make binding character evaluations when evaluating one's greatness at baseball. Why is this? Part of this is my non-judgmental streak that I've remarked on before, which can be summed up as "we can't really know anyone so how can we judge?" But given that I do generally judge Schilling to be a monster, that explanation doesn't quite do it. There's also my tendency of thinking that the hall of fame should be more focused on history rather than hagiography, and that letting in only those that you deem "worthy" turns the enterprise into the latter. Still, that's not a concrete enough reason to explain my thinking either. What I think is the ultimate reason behind my opinion is that, given our context, taking the opposite stance would just be so meaningless.
To explain why I feel this way, let's harken back to a recent inductee we all remember: Mariano Rivera. The Sandman was the best relief pitcher of all time and an easy call for the hall of fame. He managed inclusion even though like Schilling, he has a documented history of supporting far-right politics as well as Trump himself. And yet there was little to no controversy as Rivera was elected to the hall with every single vote for the first time in history. So what's the difference? At the risk of being overly-reductive, it's almost certainly that Rivera has avoided the most nominally vulgar expressions of this allegiance while Schilling has not. From a material perspective, Rivera and Schilling's respective levels of support for Trump and his policies of death and destruction are in the same ballpark (baseball pun) if not exactly the same. But Rivera's aesthetics are deemed acceptable so he's in and Schilling is not.
This of course isn't to say we should normalize Schilling's antics. Rather we should question if the growing consensus around what is and isn't acceptable behavior to gain access to the hall of fame implicitly normalizes Rivera's actions. We should ask if an interpretation of the character clause that limits itself to the most obvious and banal moral standpoints does more harm than good. If we're really going to try to find the true measure of a man to determine his worthiness of honor, then the results of that process should not just result in the exclusion of the people we can easily justify, or worse, those that we simply don't like. Either you have to take a full, honest accounting of those you are voting for, or you have to deem such a process fundamentally impossible. Anything else is a facile and empty gesture.
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