Hours after the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick seemed to suggest that if ESPN could terminate Curt Schilling for expressing his personal views, what’s up with Chris Broussard keeping his job, the Washington Post’s Des Bieler reports the network edited a rebroadcast of their “Four Days In October” ’30 for 30′ documentary to omit any mention of Schilling’s Game 6 bloody sock heroics.
The recounting of that performance, and Game 6 in general (including Alex Rodriguez knocking a ball out of reliever Bronson Arroyo’s glove), takes up about 17 minutes of the original version of the hour-and-five-minute-long documentary. ESPN apparently wanted to trim “Four Days in October,” which aired on ESPN2 after an Arizona-Oregon softball game and was likely timed to precede a live Red Sox-Yankees telecast on the main channel, down to fit into an hour-long time slot, with commercials.
“When a live event runs long, it’s standard procedure to shorten a taped program that follows,” an ESPN spokesman told The Post. “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.”
Was it just a coincidence, though, that the segment taken out happened to feature a player-turned-analyst who just parted ways with ESPN under acrimonious circumstances? At the very least, the optics of that don’t look great for the network.