Sons of Sam Horn, consider this a Roger Clemens fastball aimed right between the eyes:

“Let’s talk baseball. Here’s the deal. I will chat on baseball questions given here, answer as best I can. Now these need to be real, REAL baseball questions. Not what’s your favorite park, city, mound etc.. But serious fan questions on things like pitching in Fenway, strike zones, questec , umpires etc.. To keep this manageable, let me answer a posted question first before someone else posts another question. Got no problem with BDD posting this stuff to his site, but as I have asked before I would ask members of the media to keep this stuff here. If you are in the media and really actually care about this kinda thing then you will have 7 months to actually ask me any of these questions if you want, no problem.”

– Gehrig38, a.k.a. Curt Schilling, January 13, 2004, Sons of Sam Horn discussion board

What I’ve just excerpted above is probably going to generate an angry letter from the moderators of Sons of Sam Horn, a discussion board for rabid Red Sox fans to which marquee acquisition Curt Schilling began paying late-night visits during trade talks back in November. To which I say, BRING IT ON.

A few days ago one of my cohorts in the blogging world, David Pinto of Baseball Musings, ran an excerpt from a post in which Schilling made “disparaging comments about Rob Neyer” [it’s the seventh one down — here it is on its own; those who dare to hyperlink individual posts take note of my technique]:

“STats have their applications in the game, no one knows that more than me, but a media guy who’s writing career is pretty much founded on these new stats and has a legion of followers, a guy like Neyer on ESPN, I tend to have more dislikes, than likes of. I’m not saying he’s wrong, or right, just that he talks about the numbers as they pertain to future performance almost as if it’s an absolute. Oh I know he always inserts the italicized “maybe” and “potentially”, but the tone of his writing suggests his belief lies more in what he is writing to be fact, than just trend and probability. I’ve seen him say things in the past about players, and be so far wrong it’s ludicrous, but you do enough projecting, of enough people, and at some point you’ll be right, or near right.”

For excerpting a quote (I don’t know for sure if I’ve selected the same one but it hardly matters), moderator Eric Christenson, a.k.a. “Lanternjaw,” accused Pinto of unethical conduct and pressured him into removing that quote from his site, on the argument that what Schilling says in that forum is “off the record.”

Think about that for a moment. Someone is posting something somewhere on the Internet, a medium which can be accessed all over the world by any slack-jawed yokel with a computer and a phone line, yet this person is naive enough to believe that his words, which are RECORDED FOR POSTERITY on a publicly viewable site and can be Googled, are somehow “off the record.”

I don’t buy that for a minute, and neither should you. But I’m going to back up a moment and return to the first statement. Schilling aimed his request at “members of the media” who have first-person access to him during the baseball season, not at bloggers or webmasters. Those reporters, who depend on that access to do their jobs correctly during the baseball season, have respected his wishes, so far as I can tell. For better or worse, the blogosphere is not “the media,” and thus Schilling’s statement is not aimed there. So what Pinto did or what I’ve done is not out of line. By the commonly held standards of the Internet, this would constitute fair use. I have not changed the quotation, I have cited its source, and I have hyperlinked it so that others may see its original context, which itself is a matter of public record.

Schilling’s experiment with posting to SoSH is a fascinating one, placing one of the game’s most outgoing and outspoken players in the grasp of its most cyber-savvy fan base. I once rooted hard for him, back when he was a member of the ’93 Phillies, a slovenly bunch of misfits and dirt dogs who nearly won a World Series. But my feelings shifted a few years later when he added the role of locker-room GM to his title, lobbying hard for a trade out of Philly (not that I’m a fan), and turned to downright loathing ever since he wore purple and teal to the 2001 World Series. I hate him even more now that he’s wearing a pair of Red Sox.

But that double hatred — combining all of my schadenfreude into one low monthly payment, as I like to say — isn’t what’s coloring this response. Will Carroll reminded everyone the other day never to “write angry” and I spent much of Thursday trying to resist the poison pen in favor of a more rational response. I used twelve-letter words elsewhere and I’m not so proud of that, but I stopped myself from doing damage to the high standards to which I hold myself here and to supporting a cause in which I believe.

Whether Curt Schilling is ranting about an allegiance to an unpopular political doctrine or calling out Rob Neyer for inaccuracies is beside the point. What Schilling has said is by definition on the record, and for him to expect NOT to be held accountable is hopelessly naive and a perversion of the medium’s purpose. If Sons of Sam Horn wants to keep him “off the record,” they should put him behind a members-only firewall and then bring the hammer down on anybody who violates their terms of service, in the same way that, to use an example, Baseball Prospectus might do if I ran a bunch of lengthy quotes from Joe Sheehan’s latest column or even my own articles there — that’s intellectual property to which they own the rights. SoSH’s content is not behind a curtain like BP’s content is, it’s right out there for anybody to see, and that’s a huge difference. You have to be a member to post there, but you don’t have to be one to read what’s already been written.

Still, that is not even the issue which made my blood boil on Thursday. What did so was Christenson/Lanternjaw’s request. Pinto decided to comply with it and is apparently content to let the matter pass without further public comment so as not to draw more attention to SoSH.

But some things are wrong and deserve to be called out rather than quietly dismissed, and intimidation in the name of censorship is one of them. Always. Whether it’s regarding the exposure of corruption in the halls of government or a trivial discussion about baseball, nobody has a right to tell me what I can’t write or say so long as I’m not committing libel or plagiarizing material. The writing in question is publicly viewable and is fair game for fair usage, and Pinto’s site, or mine, are beyond the jurisdiction of SoSH. I challenge them to find a lawyer who would tell us otherwise. If Steven Goldman didn’t have to take his Schilling quotes off of YES in his latest Pinstriped Bible, then I can guess that the Yankees counsel isn’t too worried, and they understand the laws about this far better than I do.

I would rather see the Schilling experiment ended and SoSH go down in flames or have them pay somebody to install a closed system than to see ANY BLOGGER told what we can and cannot link to so long as it is done within the spirit of fair use and other ethical standards. On this I am uncompromising, and I make no apology for standing up to those who would try to prevent me or any of my peers from doing the same.

As I’ve said before, I think the Schilling experiment is a fascinating one, and I hope that he’s just the first of many players to delve into such contact. But that said, he must play by the same rules the rest of us do, and if he can’t do that without fanboy thugs bending over backwards to zealously protect their exclusive access by intimidating others, then he and the site which is hosting him should take their ball and go home.