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Curt Schilling's Twitter Gaffe Leads To Season Ending Suspension For ESPN MLB Analyst

This article is more than 8 years old.

Horrible things come in small packages as Curt Schilling found out recently. His now infamous tweet, a brief blast of words and images, has now cost him the remainder of the season as an MLB analyst for ESPN.

ESPN Public Relations’ Josh Krulewitz (h/t Bleacher Report) took to Twitter to break the news that Schilling would not appear for the remainder of the MLB season, including postseason games, and offered the impetus behind that decision.

For the uninitiated, Schilling posted a tweet on August 25 that showed an image that, as Boston.com stated at the time, “(compared) the percentage of Muslims who are extremists to the percentage of Germans in 1940 who were Nazis.” While deleted, a screenshot of the tweet lives on at that website.

The immediate fallout from the tweet was a general uproar from the peanut gallery and subsequent suspension for Schilling from any duties tied to ESPN’s coverage of the Little League World Series.

As we now know from Krulewitz, the suspension will be for far longer.

The statement reads: “At all times during the course of their engagement with us, our commentators are directly linked to ESPN and are the face of our brand. We are a sports media company. 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. As a result, he will not appear on ESPN through the remainder of the regular season and our Wild Card playoff game.”

As other outlets have noted, Schilling has had a tumultuous time on twitter, previously railing against the merits of evolution in various Twitter diatribes.

The most recent Twitter fiasco was far more caustic and deplorable, leading to the cessation of his duties for the remainder of the 2015 season.

Schilling, for his part, is owning up to his mistake. Here is what he had to tweet back on Aug. 25:

Tweeting incendiary posts only to get suspended or fired is hardly a baseball issue and far from a problem resting solely in the sports world.

Even a cursory Google search will surface myriad times an ill-fated social media post went out into the Internet ether only to come back to have very real and tangible repercussions for the person who so flippantly sent it out.

From celebrities to those previously lurking in anonymity, from the likes of Gilbert Gottfried to Ozzie Guillen to a woman who lost her job before her first day, the Internet is rife with cringe inducing teachable moments.

Forbes’ Bailey Brautigan opined that the problem might very well boil down to old school sentiment meeting a new school innovation.

I think it’s a simple case of people are, in the end, big dumb animals. And when you have a forum that seems like a one-way conversation with minimal consequence it leads to disaster.

The thumbs get typing, eager to go bigger and bolder with a hotter take than anyone else on the Internet.

Well, these tweets don’t exist in a vacuum, they are, for better or worse, a living legacy to our thoughts and opinions, no matter how insane they might be at the time.

And, for the most part, they will live on this here Internet machine in perpetuity thanks to screenshots and the like.

And the one step that people so often forget is that the tweet represents not only your own brand, but also that of the organization of which you are employed.

It’s a free country. You can have whatever outdated, ignorant opinion that you want. But the minute you send out a tweet, it’s out there—like some magical social media piñata that people will swing at until it explodes.

Careful tweeting out there, everybody.