When we last checked with Curt Schilling, the beloved Boston Red Sox pitching icon was considering parlaying his status as Beantown’s baseball Moses into a run for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.
Now, Schilling is considering trading the Massachusetts venue of his video game business for a site in neighboring Rhode Island and a $75 million loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp.
What a difference a year makes.
Schilling became a Bosox legend when he won Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series while blood from an injured ankle seeped through his sock. Largely because of Schilling’s red sock, the Red Sox were able to overcome the hated New York Yankees, who at one point led the ACLS 3-0.
The famous “bloody sock” episode—and some long-ball from the vitamin-enhanced bats of Manny Ramirez and David “Big Papi” Ortiz—enabled the Red Sox to finally lift the 86-year-old “Curse of the Bambino,” so named because New England’s star-crossed major league team had failed to win a World Series since its owner traded Babe Ruth to New York in 1918.
Boston swept the 2004 World Series and Schilling was hailed in Beantown as the greatest thing since clam chowder. In addition to speculation about a potential political career, Schilling became a fixture on talk radio, generated a ton of web traffic with his blog, and started a video game business called 38 Studios LLC, named after his uniform number.
Now comes news that Schilling is in active discussions with Rhode Island’s EDC to move the Maynard, MA-based company, which employs 180 (it also has an outlet in Maryland), to Providence. Apparently, Schilling is looking for bigger digs because he just landed a deal with Electronic Arts Inc. to market one of his video games and expects to expand to up to 500 employees.
If baseball history is a guide, Red Sox loyalists should not consider this a LeBron James-scale defection.
Before he was a World Series hero in Boston, Schilling was a World Series hero in Phoenix when he led the Arizona Diamondbacks to the crown in 2001. And before he was a World Series hero in Phoenix, Schilling led the Philadelphia Phillies to the World Series in 1993.
However, the Phillies lost the ’93 series, so presumably that rules out a Schilling candidacy for governor of Pennsylvania.
