The PED plot thickens as Hall of Fame nominee Curt Schilling has claimed that members of the Boston Red Sox staff suggested that he use performance-enhancing drugs to recover from an injury in 2008.
During an appearance on Colin Cowherd's ESPN Radio show "The Herd" on Thursday, the outspoken Schilling addressed the latest PED scandal in Major League Baseball and made a startling claim about his own brush with PEDs.
"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 said when asked if he had ever been offered "sketchy substances."
He then said that the members of the organization involved in the discussion are no longer with the Red Sox. Schilling was a member of the Red Sox from 2004 through 2008, although he missed the entire '08 season due to a shoulder injury.
"It was an incredibly uncomfortable conversation," he said. "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?"
The subject of performance-enhancing drugs is once again (although from Melky Cabrera's tarnished All-Star Game MVP to the Hall of Fame shutout it hardly ever left) at the forefront of MLB talk after a report in the Miami New Times connected Alex Rodriguez, Nelson Cruz and a handful of prominent players to a PED-peddling clinic in Miami. When asked about Ryan Braun's involvement in the scandal -- a subsequent Yahoo! report revealed that the Brewers' slugger was named in the records of the Biogenesis of America LLC clinic -- Schilling said he doesn't know who to believe and that he's "way too jaded at this point."
The question remains, are baseball fans "too jaded at this point" to take Schilling at his word?
UPDATE: According to HardBallTalk, MLB will investigated Schilling's claim. Evan Drellich of MLB.com is reporting that Red Sox team president/CEO Larry Lucchino said the organization will look into it as well.