One of my favorite things about baseball is the array of characters that have played the game over time.  In a sport where refined technique is as valued as raw athleticism, there is much more opportunity for people outside of the typical “jock” to excel.  Anyone with an oversized pituitary gland can dunk a basketball or run and make a leaping catch, but it takes more than just physical skills to understand the mechanics of effectively swinging a bat at something moving so fast you can hardly see it.  And while all sports require some amount of strategy, baseball is much more of a thinking man’s game due to its endless situational possibilities and therefore many more intellectual athletes seem to be drawn to it as opposed to other sports.  Finally, baseball is inherently much more of an individual game than any other team sport.  When a batter strikes out he cannot blame his teammates and when a team completes a perfect game it is only the pitcher who gets recorded credit for the statistic.  These nuances, along with the overly-conservative rigidity of MLB, make baseball the perfect sport for unique personas to stand out, and no character has ever shined brighter than baseball’s one and only Spaceman, Bill Lee.

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Few people would argue that former MLB pitcher Curt Schilling was a gamer. The guy’s fierce and sometimes angry competitiveness was well documented throughout his career; for many the most indelible memory of Schilling will always be his “bloody sock” performance in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS. But what many people don’t know is that Schilling is also a major gamer of another type. The live-in-your-mother’s-basement-playing-video-games-and-get-no-ass-type, to be exact. That’s right, the pitcher who struck fear into the hearts of batters everywhere is a self-admitted video gaming freak. Being the computer-smashing competitor that he is, it’s hard to imagine how Schilling treats his controllers after a bad outing. But he’s such a competitor that he actually founded his own video game production company, 38 Studios. He then went all New York Yankees on it and hired the biggest names in the fantasy gaming world to build his little dream project, including New York Times Bestselling sci-fi author R.A. Salvatore, legendary comic book artist and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, and some guy name Ken Rolston that apparently is a big deal in that realm. Schilling and his big three were at the annual Mecca for nerds, geeks, gamers, and dorks worldwide, -San Diego Comic-Con- last week to promote the game, which is due for release this fall. Listen here as Schilling discusses the designers, the game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and why the only diva contract stipulation late in his career was that all hotel rooms required high speed internet.

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Nomar Garciaparra

March 5, 2001