Curt Schilling, former Major League pitcher for the Phillies, Diamondbacks and Red Sox among others, retired from baseball this week via a post on his blog. Nobody is sure why he used his blog to retire, but that is not the most baffling part about this.

Schilling won 216 games in his career while compiling an MLB-record (min. 15 starts) 2.23 postseason ERA. He played in the Major Leagues for nearly 20 years and won three World Series. Most importantly, perhaps, he and his accomplishments were never implicated in a steroid scandal. In fact, he spoke out against illegal performance enhancers more than any other active player. So when ESPN announced the news of Schilling’s retirement, they displayed his name along with a picture of… Jose Canseco.

How is this for irony? One of the most blatant admitted cheaters in professional sports history gets face time for the retirement of one of baseball’s few advocates for cleaning up the game.

Schilling once said of Canseco, “Everything he ever did should be wiped clean. I think his MVP should go back and should go to the runner-up.”

Canseco responded, “He’s a complete hypocrite. Nobody takes him seriously.”

These two men with entirely different ideas about the game, especially about cheating within the game, are somehow linked again as Schilling retires. This was either a serious production gaffe on the part of ESPN or somebody in the control room playing mind games with him. In either case, somebody may find his or her self collecting unemployment checks soon.

If fans out there are lashing out over this, one could only imagine what Schilling thinks. Hopefully he receives word of this and he responds soon – that is, if he did not already fire a fastball through his television.

-Brenton Burkett