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Schilling declined to talk to Mitchell

Email|Link|Comments (0) Posted by David Lefort, Boston.com Staff December 14, 2007 05:56 PM

Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, in an e-mail to the New York Times, acknowledged today that he declined an invitation to speak with George Mitchell as part of baseball's probe into performance-enhancing drugs.

Mitchell said he asked to talk to five major leaguers who had spoken publicly about steroids, but all but one -- Frank Thomas -- declined. Mitchell, who did not identify who those players were, made it clear that he was not suggesting that they had used performance-enhancing drugs.

It appears now that Schilling, who has spoken about steroids in the past, once in front of Congress, was one of the four who declined that invitation.

Schilling told the Times' Jack Curry he "would have nothing to offer" the investigation "other than personal opinion and hypotheticals." Schilling wrote that he was worried that
"even if I presented opinions, it could be made more than that."

Schilling wrote that he "didn't feel it was worth it" when considering "that the mere mention of names in relation to this topic is pretty much ruining someone's career."

More quotes from the Schilling e-mail to the Times:

"As I stated before Congress, I've never seen someone inject themselves or ingest PED's, so for me to have any value to this investigation would have meant I would have had to name people I 'thought' were doing them, or in my opinion 'were clearly doing something' and I think that would have been incredibly stupid and harmful."

"I worry that not every name in the report is not a user, but how do we know which ones outside of the players who had specific evidence and testimony did it? I mean Brian Roberts's name was included, and I think people everywhere assume that, since he's on the 'list' of names ESPN presented, he's one of the guilty ones? If you read the report, his name was included because Larry Bigbie told the Mitchell investigators that Brian mentioned to him that he'd tried it. Is that right? I don't think it is."

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