Curt Schilling done for the season at ESPN due to Hitler tweets
Curt Schilling has tweeted his way out of the ESPN broadcast booth for the rest of the baseball season.
The Disney/ABC-owned company announced Thursday that Schilling would not appear on its coverage of Major League Baseball’s regular season or wild card playoff game.
Schilling, who was also an analyst for ESPN’s Little League World Series coverage, has been off the air since late August after tweeting a meme that said “only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis: How’d that go?†The copy was accompanied by a photo of Adolf Hitler.
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The former MLB pitching star deleted the tweet after a short time, but the firestorm moved fast enough to get him off ESPN’s Little League coverage. While Schilling expressed regrets over posting the meme, he did not back away from its sentiment during an email exchange with a sports TV blog. “The forum was about as poor a choice as I could have made in trying to elicit a potential discussion on that topic,†he said in an email to the website Awful Announcing. “I did not, and will not apologize for the content of the tweet.â€
In explaining Schilling’s departure, ESPN said in a statement: “Curt’s actions have not been consistent with his contractual obligations nor have they been professionally handled; they have obviously not reflected well on the company.â€
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