Curt Shilling in 2014. On Wednesday, the former pitcher was fired by ESPN. Photograph by Jim Davis/The Boston Globe/Getty

Curt Schilling crossed over from star pitcher to Boston folk hero on the night of October 19, 2004, when he started Game Six of the American League Championship Series against the Yankees with splotches of what looked like blood on the sock that covered his right ankle. Schilling had injured that ankle in the previous series, and he’d pitched poorly in the first game against the Yankees. But there he was again, after some medical assistance, giving it another go. Joe Buck, the game's announcer, helped with some on-the-spot mythologizing: "Like a scene from 'The Natural,' Schilling climbs the mound and prepares to take on this Yankee lineup." He pitched brilliantly that night, giving up one run in seven innings, as the Red Sox continued what some observers would call the greatest series in sports history, from down three games to zero, which would culminate, the next night, in a Game Seven rout of their rivals. A week later, Schilling would turn in another solid performance in the second game against the Cardinals in the World Series, which the Sox would sweep, giving the team its first title since the Woodrow Wilson Administration. For history, Game Six against the Yankees would be known as the "bloody sock" game.

Soon after, it came out that the Red Sox team doctor William Morgan had pulled off a novel procedure, in which he sewed Schilling's peroneus brevis tendon directly into his skin, in order to stabilize it and reduce pain. Adding to the lore, Morgan was said to have practiced the technique on a cadaver. One of Schilling's teammates later said that it was something out of science fiction. In the years that followed, skeptics, mostly grumpy Yankees fans, howled that Schilling had somehow doctored up his sock to make the injury more visible to the TV cameras. For conspiracy theorists in the Bronx, the bloody sock was the ketchup sock—a kind of paranoid delusion in Yankeeland that only made the whole thing sweeter for Sox fans. (In 2014, Schilling tweeted an old picture of what his ankle looked like in the fall of 2004, which was gruesome enough to put the issue to rest.) In Boston, the sock became a symbol of the underdog grit of that Sox team, and a distillation of Schilling's role as the gruff wounded warrior leading the charge. In the hierarchy of Boston sports icons, Schilling wasn't a lifer like Larry Bird or Tom Brady, but, similar to the Celtics' Kevin Garnett after him, he was a high-priced mercenary who not only delivered a title but quickly stamped his team and its fans with the indelible mark of his own outsized personality. When he retired from baseball, in 2009, a season removed from a second World Series run with the Sox, it appeared certain that Boston fans would be telling proud tales of his exploits for years to come.

On Wednesday, Schilling was fired by ESPN, where he had worked as an analyst since 2010, following a public outcry regarding a crass meme that he had shared on his Facebook page, which suggested that transgender women using a public bathroom were a threat to others. The day before, sounding a bit like Donald Trump, who has, this year, been at pains to try to explain the difference between a tweet and a retweet, Schilling argued on Boston talk radio that he wasn't transphobic, and had merely reposted someone else's take on the transgender-bathroom debate. Yet he had also posted his own comment beneath it, captured by the Daily News before it was deleted, in which he wrote, “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.” In a short statement announcing his dismissal, ESPN called itself "an inclusive company," and said, "Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated." It is, at this point, difficult to imagine Schilling holding another television job in baseball again, and it will be some time before the Red Sox invite him back for an old-timers' day.

Folk heroes get a lot of leeway—or, to put it another way, they have to screw up mightily to obliterate the good will engendered by their fabled accomplishments. And so it went with Schilling. When he went on "Good Morning America" just days after winning the World Series, in 2004, to endorse George W. Bush for President in his race against Massachusetts Senator John Kerry—well, the man was allowed his politics. When he complained to the press about the behavior of his former teammate Manny Ramirez, in 2008, calling him selfish—well, maybe he had a point. Later, after his retirement, when the video-game company he owned, 38 Studios, abruptly shuttered, in 2012, leaving hundreds of employees in the lurch and defaulting on a seventy-five-million-dollar loan from the Rhode Island government—well, it was as much the state's fault for giving him the money, and Schilling lost a reported fifty million of his own dollars, and at least it wasn't about baseball. Two years later, when he appeared at Fenway Park for the tenth anniversary of the 2004 World Series win, looking frail, having lost seventy pounds in a battle with cancer, he was cheered warmly. Later that year, talking about his cancer, which he said was the result of thirty years of tobacco use, and about the failure of his video-game company, Schilling seemed to have a new perspective on his years after baseball, saying, "I brought this on myself."

Yet the mellowing didn't last. He sparred with his ESPN colleague Keith Law on Twitter about evolution and creationism, leading, oddly, to Law being suspended from using social media. He became an Internet vigilante against trolls who wrote despicable things about a photo he posted of his daughter, who was at the time a college softball player. He posted foolish memes on Facebook about abortion, race, and Benghazi, among other subjects. Last summer, he was suspended by ESPN for the remainder of the season after he tweeted a meme which suggested that members of the Muslim faith were as dangerous as the German population that gave rise to Nazism. A few weeks ago, he said in an interview that Hillary Clinton should be "buried under a jail somewhere" for her mishandling of e-mails. This week, ESPN decided that Schilling had become too toxic to appear on its air—and Sox fans, save perhaps for a few writers at the Herald and some angry callers into WEEI, must finally reckon with the fact that Schilling is more trouble than our fond memories of his bloody sock are worth.

It is an odd footnote to Schilling's career that he has ultimately been undone by the Internet—and by the obvious pull that it has had upon him. Despite various outcries against his previous statements, Schilling still had his job last week, and, if not the universal love of Red Sox fans, then at least enduring admiration. All he had to do was stop posting on Facebook. Or, in the case of Twitter, to heed that eternally wise advice: delete your account. Instead, Schilling seems to have been overcome by a modern version of Edgar Allan Poe's Imp of the Perverse, the compulsion to do something that one knows is wrong for the very precipitous thrill of doing it. Schilling just couldn't keep his thoughts to himself. There was nothing, of course, requiring him to do so. This isn't, as some have argued, a matter of the First Amendment, or even of the chilling effect that Internet opprobrium has had on controversial speech. Schilling isn't being denied his right to free expression: he is allowed to say what he wants, just as ESPN is allowed to deny him its platform on which to say it. As to the question of whether Schilling's various comments might have been tolerated had they reflected a more correct political opinion (the old lefty Bill Walton, after all, gets to opine about whatever crosses his mind during college-basketball broadcasts), it is less a matter of the content of his comments than the utter tastelessness with which he expresses them. Walton would never say whatever is the opposite of "Men’s room was designed for the penis."

Announcing his retirement, in 1939, Lou Gehrig—Schilling's hero, a man whom he named his son and Twitter handle after, and who inspired him to become a fund-raiser and advocate in the fight against A.L.S.—spoke what would become baseball's most famous words. "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got," he said. "Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this Earth." If this latest bout of infamy is to be the thing that finally boots Schilling from the game of baseball, his own coda will be remembered as considerably less graceful. "I have opinions, but they’re just that, opinions," Schilling wrote on Tuesday, in an angry post on his blog. "And opinions are like buttholes, everyone has one and they usually stink."