ESPN decided it has had enough trouble from Curt Schilling and yesterday fired the former Red Sox ace from his role as baseball analyst.

Schilling doesn’t seem to be able to help himself from sharing his opinions, as he has found himself in hot water time and again since his retirement from baseball.

He probably didn’t help himself by his defiance and insistence on doubling-down on his comments, both on WEEI and on his personal blog. It’s one thing to own your comments and opinions and another to put the fault back on others for reacting to things you say.

Meanwhile, WEEI.com had a column by John Tomase endorsing the firing of Schilling.

Look, shouldn’t Tomase be the very last person in the Boston media to judge whether someone should be fired? Yes, I’ll say it again, the guy made up a story which resulted in his employer having to retract the story and publicly apologize, and he faced no public consequences whatsoever.

In irony of ironies, Tomase’s story yesterday has a correction on it for misrepresenting Schilling’s position on the matter.

NESN experimented with a three-man booth during yesterday afternoon’s Red Sox loss to the Rays. Play-by-play man Dave O’Brien was joined by Jerry Remy and Steve Lyons in the booth for the broadcast.

Reactions were mixed on Twitter during the game, but the move caught the attention on many. NESN has been mixing around the analysts with O’Brien thus far this season, not using Jerry Remy full-time as in the past.

The reasons seem to be mainly money-based, with the network not wishing to pay for full-time analysts, but instead mixing around a few part-timers instead.

NESN was also honored this week by Cynopsis Media as the Regional Sports Network (RSN) of the Year at the 5th Annual Sports Media Awards Breakfast held at the New York Athletic Club.

Former Boston Herald and Globe Patriots writer Albert Breer is on the move again, leaving NFL Network for Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback site.

Breer had a few rough patches at NFL Network, including a reputed disagreement with an editor which resulted in some time off the air. Moving to MMQB is a good opportunity for the well-travelled Breer.

Bill Barnwell, one of the original Grantland staff writers, and formerly of Football Outsiders (and Patriots Daily) will not be joining Bill Simmons on his new site The Ringer, instead Barnwell has signed a multi-year deal to stay with ESPN.

I enjoyed this piece from Tom E Curran yesterday showing how the NFL has time and again the NFL has publicly dismissed suggestions by Bill Belichick, only to come back and revisit and move towards those original ideas later in the future.

How long should Red Sox give John Farrell? – Peter Abraham thinks about 40 games should be enough to decide the future of the Red Sox manager.

Celtics must believe in themselves – Steve Bulpett says that too often in the first two games against Atlanta, the Celtics looked like they did not trust themselves.

Published by Bruce Allen

Automattician.

21 thoughts on “Schilling Canned By ESPN”

  1. I don’t know how you can say Tomase has faced no public consequences when you bring it up every time you mention his name, as do plenty of others. It is something that will follow him for the rest of his life.

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    1. Please. Has it impacted his professional career one iota?

      No. He got promoted to the Red Sox beat a year later. (Where he wanted to be all along anyway.) Then he got a promotion in moving to the columnist role at WEEI.com.

      Professionally, it appears to have been a winning move for him. Fellow media members don’t mention it. He blocks anyone on Twitter who mentions it.

      I don’t think we have to worry about the consequences hanging over poor John.

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    2. I’m glad to see Tomase continuously raked over the coals in this space.

      The average schmoe doesn’t visit this site. If you were to tell the average schmoe the story about the Patriots filming the Rams practice before the Super Bowl was 100% utter bunk, the 2 most common responses would be:

      1) Oh, really? I never saw any retraction or correction. Just the initial story. Crazy.
      2) I read the story on ESPN you Pats truther, it’s definitely true….I don’t care what you say.

      People remember the initial shocking headline, not any of the factual evidence supporting or incompetent author who butchered the article.

      See:
      Duke lacrosse rape accusations
      Patriots ball deflation
      St. Louis Cardinals fans allegedly calling Jason Heyward the n-word this week
      And on and on..

      In short, fuck Tomase with a rusted crank shaft.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Not only do fellow media members not mention Tomase’s single-handed destruction of the Patriots brand, they circle the frigging wagons around him any time someone dares call him on it. Did you hear him call in to D&C the other day? They asked him to defend 3 points of misinformation in his Curt Schilling column. One other thing they did was play the Hannah Storm soundbite referencing the ‘taping of practices’ that were ‘certainly part of the Patriots’ history’ and then asked him how he feels when he hears that. He said he feels bad, but that he didn’t know what that had to do with the Schilling piece. Yay – he feels bad. Great. Just once I’d like him to acknowledge the damage that story did to the Pats’ reputation and how bad he feels for them and for Pats fans.
      So anyway – the third piece of misinformation they asked him about was something he pretty much made up and when called on it said “poor choice of words on my part”. Wow. The guy’s a frigging WRITER and he chose his words poorly? That’s an excuse? Great. So, he accuses someone of something but when he gets called on it and asked to ‘prove it’ he turtles and says ‘well, ya got me, sorry’. I’m guessing that’s why they played the Hannah Storm clip. Mystery solved.

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    4. Kay,

      I am not as kind as the other responders to your post. You have to be brain dead stupid, a Tomase relative or the most naive person in Boston to think Tomase has suffered one iota. Further, several of us have spent years detailing what he did, what was wrong with what he did and how incredulous it is that he still has a job while no one in the media seems to have an issue working with him, sharing opinions with him even though he has a history of making crap up or holding him accountable. Instead as Bruce says they rally around him…you hear quotes like he is a good guy and good reporter who made one mistake. Its bull pucky…he went out of his way to make up a story so he could BE the story during Super Bowl week. His story compounded the idiocy of deflate gate to the point that 15 years later members of ESPN have to continue to be reminded that the Patriots did not tape the Cards walkthrough. Let me repeat that…15 years later and the predominant sports news organization in the world has to remind its staff that the Patriots did not tape the Rams walkthrough…all because Tomase wrote they had. The Herald suffered no repercussions…the Pats should have pulled all advertising and press passes from the Herald…but they didn’t. Tomase got promoted to the Sox beat and now he has a better job with WEEI.

      He has no remorse. He has no honor. He has no talent. I have not read anything he has written since…and I never will. However I will rally against both the Herald and now WEEI until he is unemployed. I have a long memory…those of us on this site all do. So no Tomase has not faced public consequences…at least not until his byline disappears from all Boston media.

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    5. I’m unaware of any profession like media where you can commit malfeasance at the level media members (Tomase) do and not only have no consequences but have it be a promotion.

      The “consequences” of his reporting still affect the team to this day.

      I equated this to a doctor promoting some risky/shit medicine and ignoring proper testing/procedure before giving it to patients. Patient(s) die and then the doctor not only never loses his license but winds up being promoted to some fancy department head at a prestigious hospital.

      Moreover, the entire industry seems to laud this and promote an atmosphere and environment of this general neglect. I can’t immediately think of any other industry where being not just wrong but gross incompetence is the standard. Someone once said forecasting like weather people, but I knew they were forecasting (part guessing/interpreting) and they were also not important enough for their profession to be considered the “4th wing of the government.”

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      1. It is amazing, isn’t it? Federal agencies are probably the worst for that sort of thing, but journalism is a close second. Borges plagiarizes, leaves the Globe for a little while, and still gets hired by the other major paper in town as if nothing happened. Shank routinely makes stuff up, or at least embellishes things in order to push one of his many agendas, and the Globe just runs a tiny retraction a few days later without even mentioning his name in the retraction. Van Natta publishes non-corroborated accusations from 90 unnamed sources, and when he’s rightly criticized for it, like a pack of rabid dogs, his “colleagues” all rush to his defense and point out that he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner — as if that grants him some kind of immunity from criticism. And Tomase…..he keeps his job, and even gets promoted, and you hear nothing but accolades from his co-religionists in the Fourth Estate. It’s not just the sports media either — most journalists get away with this kind of crap all the time (unless they’re TV personalities who are known to be difficult to work with, like Olbermann, and then they may lose a gig every now and then).

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  2. Looks like Mike Reiss got another “tight edit” this morning. When I went to ESPNBoston.com, the link to his Sunday notes piece was right there for all to see. Below, the following blurb:

    “Even though the stripped first-round pick has deflated draft excitement for New England Patriots fans, the team can pick up some key parts this week.”

    I can promise you he didn’t write that.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. I’m guessing that NESN is paying O’Brien significantly more than Orsillo so they may be trying to make up the difference by economizing on the analyst position. I’ve never been a fan of either 3 man booths or Steve Lyons so I hope it’s a short-lived experiment.

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    1. Which movie was it where Will Ferrell’s character exclaimed, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”? That’s what I feel like in the wake of this ruling by the appeals court. I simply cannot believe this entirely made up, fake scandal, beset with a cacophony of lies by Wells, Pash, and the rest of the NFL minions on Park Ave., is going to end up costing the Pats two draft picks, including a first rounder, and their star QB for the first four games of the season. At this point, Brady should file a $1B defamation suit. Who cares if he can win it or not? At least it would force the NFL into the Discovery process. Crazy pills……

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      1. Not sure what to say, either.

        We’ve hashed this one out so much here and everywhere.

        I’m tired of it and the NFL.

        Steph Stradley said the NFL did things to protect itself from having the actual case reopened if Brady filed one What these are, I’m not sure, but she’s been one of the few that have been good to follow.

        The only other happy ending to this is DG being Mo Lewis 2.0 and Jimmy G is the next Brady. Yup, I know that it’s a Thorton-esque lame fantasy, but that’s all I can think of.

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        1. I’m tired of it as well. Whatever…if he can’t get the facts out through a defamation suit, as Stradley says, then so be it. As for the actual season, if they can win 11 games with Matt Cassell at the helm, with a defense (in 2008) that was probably worse than the one they’ve got heading into 2016, then Jimmy G. can probably go 2-2, at worst, and then Brady comes back and they go 10-2 as long as they stay healthy. Is that good enough for home field? We’ll see. But even last year they would have won the AFC without home field had they not been the most injured team in the NFL by a factor of about five.

          The one thing that this decision might do, I think, is accelerate BB’s departure. He has to be seething over this, and I’m sure he, like Kraft, and like Brady, never imagined that the suspension would ever be upheld. The league is directly effing with his team in an overt, egregious, dishonest and unfair way. He’s got to be fed up at this point. That said, I think he will stick around until he either wins #5, which would put him at the top of the mountain all time, ahead of Noll; or, until he senses that #5 isn’t going to happen any time soon and he feels like a rebuilding process is in order.

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      2. Zoolander. That was the ‘crazy pills’ movie.

        Sigh. If Brady went down in the preseason with some random injury that would keep him out for the first four regular season games, I’d feel reasonably positive about the Pats’ overall chances in 2016, so I’m not wringing my hands about the suspension per se. The thing that’s bugging me is that this authoritarian rubber stamp just fixes – even deeper in the minds of most NFL fans – the narrative of Tom Brady and the Patriots being lying cheaters. Even though it’s really about the owners’ power over the players, it’s never going to be commonly perceived that way – it’s always going to be seen as the courts slamming the cheater.

        It’s kind of depressing.

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        1. Yup. That’s the worst part about this. The same people who said Brady was “not exonerated” by Berman last September will now say that the “Patriots are cheaters” meme has the official imprimatur of the American court system — even though both Berman and this appeals court were ruling on the exact same thing. Whaddya gonna do? As long as they’re healthy when January rolls around, even if they get into the playoffs as the sixth seed at 10-6, they could still go all the way. Injuries, and nothing else, kept them from a fifth Lombardi last season. They’re still the best, or one of the 2 or 3 best teams in the league as we sit here in late April.

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  5. Shank (or someone Tweeting for Shank) has a Twitter post tonight saying that the Court of Appeals delivered “a complete smackdown to fanboy Berman.” Normally I’d get angry and just go off and rant about him…..again, but that Tweet is so predictably and pathetically trollish that I can’t even gin up the energy to get pi$$ed about it. He’s so far past his relevancy expiration date that I almost feel sorry for him……almost. What a pathetic sack of cow dung.

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    1. His Shankiness did it today. As you may recall, he was one of those who (rightly) said that Berman’s overturning of the NFL’s discipline didn’t exonorate Brady. Now that the worm has turned, he came out with this at the end of today’s version of “I Hate Bob Kraft” :

      “The judges think Brady and the Patriots are guilty.”

      Wow. The judges went well out of their frigging way to say that this was NOT a decision on whether or not there was any ball deflation, so Shank is just doing what Shank does – he’s being a troll.

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      1. Ah, just as I predicted. Those who said Berman’s ruling “did not exonerate Brady” are now latching on to the 2nd Circuit’s decision as proof that the Patriots are guilty. I should buy a lottery ticket today…..no, wait a minute; the lottery is totally unpredictable, while the behavior of these useless media trolls is 100% predictable. I’ll keep the $2 and buy a coffee instead. Like I said…Shank is just pathetic. He’s so pathetic that I almost feel sorry for him, but not quite. Pathetic sack of cow dung.

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  6. A friend and long time Patsfan called me yesterday to tell me his wife is not at all happy with him. He informed her that with the Appeals Court ruling he is now done with the NFL. As such he will have 20 extra Sundays to do things with her. She, of course, relished her alone time and now has no idea how she will keep him occupied for a 7th day during the week.

    The idea that the NFL has turned rabid fans into apathetic ones…at least in NE (and maybe in New Orleans and Kansas City), should be something that gets the powers to be to sit up and notice. Instead it is business as usual. I am so far beyond annoyed to care. In the grand scheme of things it is a game…I get that…what bothers me is the school yard lessons of fairness and sportsmanship…out the window. I blame coaches like Lombardi and Parcells and even Belichick…I blame owners like Davis, Modell and Jones….win at all costs…consequences be damned. I have made this analogy in the past…Professional golfers penalize themselves if their balls move on the green or if they ground their club in a hazard. In the NFL…find a rule, twist it, bend it, exert power over it…who cares as long as you are trying to win…or in the leagues case keep a team from winning.

    Unlike my friend I am not out…however I doubt I will fight with my wife if she plans a dance competition for my daughter on a Sunday this year. UGH!

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  7. Via Mike Freeman this morning:

    “I hate the Patriots. I despise them,” said one NFC team executive, who like everyone else interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of angering the league office. “But they really should get those picks back.”

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