Thomas] and asking if Curt was available. He'd kind of laugh at me and say, 'No way.' But one day I called and Lee said, 'If Schilling comes up here one more time trying to run my ballclub, he's going on the market.' "
Schilling kept telling anybody who would listen that he wanted to stay in Philly, but only if they made a clear commitment to winning that included spending more money to obtain better players. Sometimes, Schil would call his favorite talk-radio station from his auto on the way to Veterans Stadium, and enumerate his many gripes. This was fingernails on the blackboard stuff to a front office that has always been loath to have its dirty laundry publicized, particularly by a 1993 hero who had become a face of the franchise.
Larry Andersen, now a radio voice, was the weary reliever who set up closer Mitch Williams that fatal Game 6 in Toronto, Schilling with the towel covering his head and face, Joe Carter up with one out, two runners on, the Phils clinging to a 6-5 lead. A lot of people on that bench have never fully forgiven Schilling for the way he showed up his teammate with the baseball world watching. And it didn't matter that Williams wound up serving the most dramatic World Series walkoff homer since Bill Mazeroski in 1960.
Cops, firefighters, ballplayers of all sports follow the same rough code of loyalty as Hollywood's Sam Spade, a private eye whose partner, Miles Archer, was set up by a femme fatale and shot to death. "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it," Spade (Humphrey Bogart) says in "The Maltese Falcon." "It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it."
