Curt Schilling Says He’d Be in the Hall of Fame If He Were Anti-Trump

Screenshot via Fox Business

There’s a decent chance Curt Schilling won’t make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, his fifth crack at Cooperstown. Players must appear on 75 percent of ballots to gain induction, and the three-time World Series champ currently sits at 54.5, with 35.4 percent of ballots publicly disclosed according to this handy tracker.

In the event he doesn’t make the cut, Schilling told TMZ Sports he’ll know precisely why: his outspoken brand of conservative politics.

“They’re not hiding the fact that they’ve stopped voting for me because of the things I’ve said on social media. That’s their prerogative as voters,” Schilling said. The former Red Sox pitcher was relieved of his duties at ESPN last year following controversial posts about Muslims and transgender people on his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Schilling, now an Internet radio host at Breitbart with Senate aspirations in 2018, later drew criticism for calling a shirt that joked about lynching journalists “so much awesome.” (He later deleted the tweet amidst outrage from the liberal “wusses.”)

“The people who said they’re not going to vote for me are not going to vote for me because of the character clause. There are some of the worst human beings I’ve ever known voting,” Schilling said. “I promise you, if I had said, ‘Lynch Trump,’ I’d be getting in with about 90 percent of the vote this year.”

Rule 5 of the BBHOF’s election requirements states that voters must take into account a player’s “integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” The Globe‘s Dan Shaughnessy has already said he won’t cast a vote for the 2001 World Series MVP over the lynching tweet, calling Schilling an “actual menace to society.”