New York Times: Thrown for a Curve in Rhode Island

You have to imagine what it was like being Don Carcieri in the harsh winter of 2010. As Rhode Island’s governor, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, he had come into office seven years earlier as a business executive turned politician, vowing to retool the state’s corroded economy.

But that winter, Rhode Island was on the precipice of economic ruin. Its unemployment rate was pushing up against 12 percent — fourth worst in the nation — and three of its cities were careening toward bankruptcy. Facing term limits, Mr. Carcieri had only months left to do something to arrest the steep decline.

And that’s when Don Carcieri ran into Curt Schilling, the revered former Boston Red Sox ace — the man who had famously bled through a sock while pitching his team to its first World Series title in 86 years. That March, Mr. Carcieri attended a fund-raiser for a prospective documentary at Mr. Schilling’s 25-acre estate in Medfield, Mass. The two men exchanged pleasantries in the living room before the talk turned abruptly to business.

“I said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ ” Mr. Carcieri recalled when I met him recently, at a Panera Bread in East Greenwich, R.I., his hometown. “And he said, ‘I’ve got this business, this company, creating video games.’ Which I knew nothing about — my grandkids know more about it than I do. But he was describing it. He said: ‘It’s a great little company, it’s growing,’ et cetera. And he was looking to grow it further.”

More to the point, Mr. Schilling let drop that he wasn’t getting much help in Massachusetts when it came to the financing he needed to expand, and he was frustrated. You can imagine the heralding trumpets that must have been blasting in Mr. Carcieri’s ears as he listened to Mr. Schilling dangle hundreds of jobs in front of him.

NY Times: Thrown for a Curve in Rhode Island

It may be hard to understand how all of this happened without understanding the ancient, one-sided rivalry that exists between Rhode Island, a state of just 1,000 square miles, and Massachusetts, which squeezes Rhode Island on two sides like a vise. Massachusetts is the land of the Red Sox and the Kennedys; Rhode Island makes do with the Red Sox’ Class AAA affiliate in Pawtucket and has a history of rampant political corruption.

Going back to the 1980s, Massachusetts developed a high-tech corridor near Cambridge that enabled it to transcend its manufacturing roots. Rhode Island remained stubbornly wedded to its textile makers and jewelry factories, most of them now long gone or crumbling.

So when Curt Schilling came courting in the weeks after his encounter with Mr. Carcieri, it wasn’t just the promise of jobs that caught the attention of the state’s political establishment. Here was one of Boston’s greatest living legends, a proven winner who had sunk something like $50 million of his own fortune into his company, and he was looking to build it not in Kendall Square of Cambridge, but near the old Jewelry District of Providence. If ever there was a way to show up the Bay Staters next door, this had to be it. [...]

If there’s a lesson in all this, it probably has to do with the limits of what any government can — or should — do to bring about growth. Just about every state offers some kind of tax incentive or loan program for businesses looking to relocate. But Rhode Island went further than that; in its zeal to land Mr. Schilling, the state took on the role of venture capitalist, without having the expertise to do it well.

An actual venture capital firm would have been investing in many companies at once, to minimize its exposure, and it would have demanded a sizable equity stake. It would have taken a seat on the board so it could monitor the money closely and, if needed, restructure the company. Rhode Island, instead, threw most of its venture money into a single, highly speculative start-up, insisted that it more than double the size of its work force, and then walked away.

Yahoo! Sports: Passan: Red Sox’s Use of Toradol Could Put Ex-Trainer At Odds With Law

“I had a Toradol shot almost every single game for the last 10 years of my career,” Schilling told Yahoo! Sports. “It was never administered by a doctor at home or on the road. I didn’t think it was wrong.”
Though Schilling said Reinold never injected him with Toradol – he declined to say who did – the right-hander said he saw Reinold inject other players.
“Absolutely he did,” Schilling said.
. . .
More than 300 Toradol shots over his career taught Schilling their vitality. He said he experimented with different times of injection before settling on the optimal one: 5:25 p.m., exactly 100 minutes before a 7:05 start. Even though it’s neither considered nor classified as a performance-enhancing drug, its ability to help pitchers perform isn’t in doubt. Schilling remembers one particular game, a 2002 Sunday getaway day in Milwaukee with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“I slept on a pillow wrong,” he said. “I woke up at 5:30 [a.m.]. I couldn’t move my head. I went to the ballpark at 6:30 for a 1:30 [p.m.] game. Worked for four hours on it. I literally couldn’t move my head. I went to the bullpen and started throwing and I didn’t think there was any way I could pitch.
“Then the Toradol kicked in. I threw a one-hitter and struck out 17.”

Sounds somewhat performance enhancing, no?

The league’s 2012 investigation wasn’t its first into Reinold. In 2008, as he was rehabbing an injury that would end his career, Schilling said Reinold suggested he consider taking performance-enhancing drugs to recover. Schilling told manager Terry Francona and Epstein, who reported the story to MLB.
Though officials have tried to discredit Schilling’s story since he first told it last week, Schilling maintains he has no reason to fabricate the incident. Schilling said he didn’t tell investigators the entire truth because Beckett and others liked Reinold and, as a player on his way out of the game, he did not want to upset the clubhouse.
League officials including Dan Mullin, head of the league’s Department of Investigations, and Dan Halem, MLB’s general counsel, interviewed Schilling with union leader Michael Weiner present. During the interview, Schilling recanted his story and said he had taken Reinold’s suggestion that he use performance-enhancing drugs out of context.
“I gave Reinold a free pass,” Schilling said. “I didn’t want to disrupt them trying to win a championship.”

Edes: Sources say Schilling’s [PED] claims untrue

So, this is definitely a thing.

Curt Schilling’s claim in 2008 that a member of the team’s medical staff raised the possibility of treating his injured shoulder with a performance-enhancing drug was “completely baseless,” investigations conducted by both the Boston Red Sox and Major League Baseball concluded, according to two baseball sources with direct knowledge of the investigations.

...

The investigations were thorough, the sources said, and the players’ union was informed, and both probes came to the same conclusion.  “Completely baseless,” one source said. “It didn’t happen. The staff member did not say it, and he had no PED history whatsoever.”

Schilling told ESPNBoston.com there was no team probe into the incident.

“Schilling didn’t stand up enough [to investigators] for what he said happened,” one MLB source said. “Our investigation also discovered there was some [bad] history between Schilling and [Reinold].  “Investigators interviewed one witness to the conversation, who said he did not think in any way that [Reinold] said, ‘Hey, this is something you should consider.’ “