Curt Schilling Says Red Sox Encouraged Him To Use PEDs During the 2008 Season

Remember when Bud Selig referenced the “so-called steroid era?” Curt Schilling told Colin Cowherd “former members” of the Red Sox organization advised him to try performance enhancing drugs while he was trying to rehab from a shoulder injury in 2008.

"“At the end of my career, in 2008 when I had gotten hurt, there was a conversation that I was involved in in which it was brought to my attention that this is a potential path I might want to pursue,” Schilling told Colin Cowherd. Asked for more details, Schilling said the conversation occurred in the clubhouse and involved “former members of the organization — they’re no longer there. It was an incredibly uncomfortable conversation. Because it came up in the midst of a group of people. The other people weren’t in the conversation but they could clearly hear the conversation. And it was suggested to me that at my age and in my situation, why not? What did I have to lose? Because if I wasn’t going to get healthy, it didn’t matter. And if I did get healthy, great. “It caught me off guard, to say the least. That was an awkward situation.”"

For context, Schilling signed a one-year deal with Boston after the 2007 World Series. He injured his shoulder the following February. The Red Sox tried to rehabilitate him without surgery to get some value out of him. He ended up getting an outside opinion, having shoulder surgery and missing the rest of the season. He retired the following March.

This alleged conversation occurred less than six months after the Mitchell Report was released, when such PED allegations were still “shocking.” Notions that MLB and its organizations were ignorant of what was happening, made an earnest effort to clean up the sport or even had a vested interest in doing so are laughable.

[Photo via Getty]