ESPN cuts segment on ex-employee Curt Schilling’s bloody-sock game from documentary rerun

Curt Schilling and his former employer, ESPN, seem to be having a rather messy breakup.

Days after Schilling commented on a SiriusXM interview that ESPN employs “some of the biggest racists in sports commentating,” the network mysteriously cut out a segment featuring Schilling’s baseball heroics during a Sunday re-airing of a “30 for 30” documentary on the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees on ESPN2.

ESPN offered this explanation in a statement: “When a live event runs long, it’s standard procedure to shorten a taped program that follows. In this case, we needed to edit out one of the film’s four segments to account for the extra length of the softball game.”

It struck many people, including Schilling himself, as rather convenient that the segment featuring Game 6 of that series -- during which Schilling famously pitched through a right ankle injury that caused his sock to become visibly bloodied during the game -- was the one edited out.

The outspokenly conservative Schilling had been a commentator on ESPN’s “Monday Night Baseball” until last month, when he was fired after reposting a controversial meme on Facebook widely interpreted as anti-transgender.

Last year Schilling was dropped from ESPN’s coverage of the Little League World Series and then suspended for the rest of the Major League Baseball season for tweeting a meme that compared Muslims to Nazis.

In March, Schilling appeared to have violated ESPN’s guidelines for election coverage by stating during a radio interview that Hillary Clinton “should be buried under a jail somewhere.”