ESPN removes Curt Schilling from coverage for rest of season
ESPN has removed Curt Schilling from its coverage for the rest of the 2015 MLB season.
Schilling was removed from recent Sunday Night Baseballand Little League World Series coverage in wake of a tweet he sent in late August containing a meme comparing Muslims to Nazis.
“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,” ESPN said in a statement. “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.”
Schilling tweeted an image last week of Adolf Hitler with supposed statistics comparing the number of Nazi sympathizers in Germany to the percentage of modern Muslim extremists and deleted it after a few minutes. He had posted the same image on his Facebook page earlier that day.
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In an earlier statement, ESPN called the former MLB pitcher’s comments “completely unacceptable.”
Schilling typically serves as a color commentator for ESPN’s Sunday night coverage, alongside fellow analyst John Kruk and play-by-play man Dan Shulman.
-Jeremy Woo