Sitting at his desk in the basement of his home, Curt Schilling knows he's not getting the call from the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

"They only call you if you get in," he says flatly, then turns his attention back to whoever is streaming his channel on Periscope this early in the morning.

It's not his day for the Hall. It may never be his day. Once revered as perhaps the greatest hero in Red Sox history, Schilling—who has three World Series rings and an MVP title—is now a Breitbart talking head known as much for racist memes and transphobic tweets as for his bloody sock. He's torpedoed his own chances at baseball's highest honor. Now he's contemplating a wholly unrealistic run at a different kind of election.

Schilling at work on his Breitbart radio show Dina Litovsky

It's a little before nine a.m. on a mid-January day in Medfield, Massachusetts, an hour southwest of Boston. Schilling is preparing for Whatever It Takes, his two-hour morning radio show for Breitbart News, the right-wing news organization formerly run by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. When the program begins, he talks baseball for all of two minutes before getting into politics, the heart of his show, popping Hershey Kisses in his mouth during interviews and commercial breaks. His demeanor on the show is that of a man who needs you to hear his opinions, even if he isn't all that interested in yours. Discussing a report that found black students are negatively affected by unconscious bias of white professors, Schilling begins to rant: "This is ridiculous! Keep playing the victim! You're not slaves! You haven't been beaten into slavery, and no one you know has ever owned a slave!"

The rest of the day passes slowly, but the unsurprising news eventually arrives. The percentage of baseball writers who voted for Schilling's induction has declined from 52.3 percent in 2016 to 45 percent today—the largest drop in total votes and percentage of any player on the ballot in 2017. This year he received fewer votes than either Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds, players being kept out of the Hall because of their performance-enhancing-drug use.

He believes his opinions to be so important that he's willing to sabotage his entire reputation to share them.

While percentage drop-offs are not uncommon, insiders say the reasons for Schilling's underperformance are unprecedentedly self-induced. "We haven't seen anything quite like Schilling actively fueling his own drop," says Sports Illustrated's Jay Jaffe, a Hall of Fame expert who is not a voter.

Schilling insists his exclusion doesn't bother him, though that hasn't prevented him from sounding bitter about it. "I promise you," he told TMZ in January, "if I had said, 'Lynch Trump,' I'd be getting in with about 90 percent of the vote." On announcement day, he sounds defiant. "Honestly, and I don't know how to say this to make it sound other than it sounds, but I don't care," he tells me. "I have zero control over it other than, as people say, 'Well, if you just shut up.' The thing is, I'm not going to shut up. I don't owe anybody anything. If I have to shut up to get in the Hall of Fame, then I don't want in."

The risk of Schilling shutting up seems to be nonexistent. He's suggested that Muslim extremists pose a threat comparable to Nazis , showed photos of his Nazi memorabilia, said that Hillary Clinton " should be buried under a jail somewhere ," asked CNN's Jake Tapper why Jewish people support Democrats , and defended then-Breitbart colleague Milo Yiannopoulos without seeing the video of his comments defending pedophilia .

The never-ending parade of offensive memes has made him a darling of far-right trolls and a horror to most everyone else. He has become the guinea pig for whether Hall of Fame voters will separate an athlete's accomplishments from his extreme politics. Soon his great experiment might go one step further: He is exploring whether to run against Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the most prominent stars in the Democratic party, in 2018. The campaign would be ill-advised, money-sucking, and almost certainly doomed to fail. Massachusetts hasn't elected a Republican senator in a non-special election since 1972. It was one of only four states where more than sixty percent of voters chose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

But Schilling likes to remind people that we live in a time of unlikely political upsets. "I think people in my post-baseball world have, and will, severely underestimate me, which I like," he tells me. He insists that he doesn't care what people say about him and he doesn't plan to change anything about his public persona. It's a theme he comes back to again and again: He believes his opinions to be so important that he's willing to sabotage his entire reputation to share them.

"Given how much I talk," he tells me, "it's amazing that I haven't ruined myself."

Dina Litovsky

The Breitbart show is a perfect fit for Schilling: It allows him to be in full control. He can spout off his opinions, no matter how offensive, without a hint of real debate. It's rare that a caller disagrees with him and even rarer that a guest, many of whom come from within Breitbart, doesn't go along with what he's saying, and vice versa. Though he tells me he wants more people to push back against him, it hasn't happened—calling into a Breitbart show to debate a baseball player is probably the last thing anyone from outside the core audience would want to do. That has turned this room in his basement into an echo chamber.

That's the only room in his house where people unquestioningly agree with him. Thirty minutes after he finishes taping, Schilling can't get abortion out of his head. He read a Breitbart article aloud on his show—a regular segment—about a Senate committee's investigation of Planned Parenthood. (The committee's report was found by Science magazine and other publications to have major falsehoods .) Schilling had a hard time getting through the story, pausing for a couple of seconds at a time and shaking his head to get through sentences. Shonda Schilling sits next to me at the dining-room table as her husband goes over the story again.

"They were killing babies outside the womb!" he proclaims from the kitchen.

Shonda has been a Republican since she was nineteen, but she feels strongly about women's rights and LGBT equality, and she stands her ground against her husband (though she also attacked ESPN for firing him over an anti-trans meme). When she brings up scientific research negating some of his points about Planned Parenthood, his voice gets a little louder. Soon they drown each other out. "I do think a lot of people probably think I am like him in this hard-core sense, and I'm really not," she tells me later.

Dina Litovsky

"See," she tells with a smile, "this is why he needs a radio show." Then she turns back to her husband, informing him he's standing in puppy pee and should clean it up. For now, their abortion debate is over.

Schilling is a registered independent who identifies as libertarian, but he would likely run for Senate as a Republican. He's anti-abortion and pro–Second Amendment. He's always believed these things, he says, but he didn't feel comfortable talking about them until social media gave him a platform. He says government doesn't belong anywhere near the bedroom, the bathroom, or the wedding chapel, which explains why he has no issue with gay marriage but believes keeping trans people out of the restroom they feel comfortable using is crucial.

"Tolerance is now a one-way street—'You accept all the things I'm telling you or you're a bigot.' No, that's not how the world works," Schilling says. "As a Christian, I wrestle with a lot of that stuff, and that's my own little wrestling match."

"Calling me things that I'm not, like an asshole, that doesn't bother me. It's the racist thing."

Born in Alaska and raised in Pittsburgh and Phoenix, Schilling grew up in a blue-collar family. His mother, Mary, worked as the head cashier at Lucky Stores, a now-defunct supermarket chain in Phoenix, while his father, Cliff, retired after spending twenty-two years in the army. The Schillings weren't keen on going to church, but they identified as Christians, and politics were never a significant conversation among the family. Allison, Curt's younger sister by seven years, says all three Schilling children were "daddy's kids." "He never pressured me into doing anything, but he always pressured me into doing whatever I did as hard as I could," Curt says of his father.

As a kid, Schilling obsessed over strategy games like Dungeons & Dragons and Risk, with an almost equal fascination for American history. He tells me he's always believed he's on the Asperger's scale (though he was never formally diagnosed) because of his obsessive tendencies toward those hobbies.

Mike McQuaid, who started coaching Schilling in baseball and basketball in Phoenix when Schilling was eight, remembers a strong kid who didn't have the most natural talent but would never be outmatched in intensity. "As much as anything, his dad instilled in Curt a love of baseball and playing it right," McQuaid says. "He's always had a desire to win."

Dina Litovsky

On Christmas Day in 1987, Cliff suffered a heart attack in Phoenix. Five days later, as he prepared to return to the family's home in Colorado, his aortic aneurysm burst. With his son by his side, Cliff died in January 1988 at age fifty-four. Eight months later, Schilling made his Major League debut for the Orioles. He saved a ticket for his father before every game of his career.

Two years after his career began, Schilling met Shonda Brewer, an associate producer for the local TV station that covered the team, who worked at Foot Locker in the off-season. They started talking in the shop, and when he asked for her number, she told him her last name was the mascot of a baseball team. So Schilling scoured the phone book, looking up the name of every MLB team in search of a Shonda until he found her. They went out and were married shortly thereafter; they now have four children: Gehrig, a twenty-two-year-old rising college senior (named after baseball legend Lou); Gabriella, a twenty-year-old rising junior; Grant, a seventeen-year-old recent high school graduate; and Garrison, a fifteen-year-old rising sophomore.

Schilling with his son Grant, who recently graduated from high school Dina Litovsky

The Schilling kids hear from their friends when a particularly inflammatory tweet attracts attention. Gabriella says she recognizes that people think her father is an asshole, but she supports him. "I know he's going to get in eventually," she tells me about his Hall of Fame chances. Her older brother, Gehrig, is more cautious: "Dad might not get in because of what he's said and done, Gab."

In 1995, Curt and Allison Schilling informally separated themselves from their mother and older sister, whom they accuse of trying to take advantage of Curt's fame and wealth after Cliff's death. "There was such a switch when our father passed away," Allison says. "He kept trying and it just never was enough for them." She adds: "It ate at him for years." The two sides of the family have not spoken in the twenty years since.

Schilling thinks and speaks in absolutes, especially about Democrats. On Georgia congressman John Lewis, who questioned Trump's legitimacy as president: "I think he's a racist accusing people of being racist…What is this man doing other than further eroding race relations in this country?" On Warren, his potential campaign opponent, who allegedly failed to shake the hand of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos after her confirmation hearing: "She is everything the American people despise in politics," he says. It's a line he repeats to whomever will listen.

"I want to be bigger than [Sean] Hannity and all the other guys," he tells me. "Why would that not be a goal? I'm not afraid of stumbling. I don't like being wrong, but it doesn't mean I'm going to be."

"I guess you could call my social-media instincts Trumpian-like. I'm not saying that's a good thing."

He does speak lovingly of one liberal while I am at his house: former Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, who now runs the World Series–champion Cubs and who famously spent Thanksgiving with the Schillings while trying to sign him in 2003. "That's man-love right there," Schilling says on-air one day. Epstein campaigned for Hillary Clinton, and former Obama advisor David Axelrod has pushed for Epstein to run for office himself. After they won the World Series last year, Epstein's Cubs elected to expedite the team visit to the White House so they would be greeted by Obama instead of Trump. "That's Theo Epstein. God bless him," Schilling tells me.

Epstein did not return multiple requests for comment about his former ace's turn toward politics, but it was no secret in the Red Sox clubhouse that Schilling held conservative beliefs. It largely didn't matter, though, in part because Schilling won games. His most iconic moment as a pitcher came when he won game six of the 2004 American League Championship Series despite pitching on a torn tendon sheath in his ankle that bled through his sock on the mound. The performance, and another win in game two of the World Series, helped the Red Sox win their first championship in 86 years.

The morning after the team lifted the World Series trophy, Schilling went on Good Morning America and gave an unprompted endorsement of President George W. Bush—one of the first public indicators that Schilling wanted to talk more than just baseball. He would go on to endorse Senator John McCain in the 2008 election and campaign for Scott Brown in the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in 2010. (Brown won but was defeated by Warren in 2012.)

Boston Globe

Teammate Dave McCarty, who played with Schilling on the Red Sox for four seasons and then covered him as a commentator for local broadcaster NESN, says Schilling was a terrific teammate who loved playing cribbage in the locker room, was willing to be the butt of clubhouse jokes, and brought up politics regularly. "Curt being Curt, was always outspoken and said what was on his mind, and wasn't worried about what other people thought about it," says McCarty, forty-seven, now a commercial real-estate broker in the San Francisco Bay Area. "I found that to be very refreshing."

Or as Schilling put it: "If I have a problem with you, I'd rather tell you the problem than hide it and be like, 'You're a fucking backstabber.'"

While some teammates did find Schilling's views off-putting, former Red Sox catcher Doug Mirabelli says, it never became a problem—his loyalty to the group allowed them to overlook other things. "He's quick, witty, and relentless, and that's what we liked about him," says Mirabelli, forty-six, who remains a friend of Schilling's.

Former Red Sox teammate Kevin Millar, meanwhile, told reporters in January that Schilling should stop sharing his opinions publicly : "If I was Curt, I would find a way to maybe just talk to the wife and family around the dinner table." (He added that he does not believe character issues should keep a worthy player out of the Hall of Fame.) "I'm trying to separate his Red Sox career from his post–Red Sox career," former Red Sox president Larry Lucchino told The Boston Globe in October.

But many in and around baseball refuse to discuss Schilling at all. Multiple interview requests to Epstein, Terry Francona, Bob Brenly, John Farrell, Joe Garagiola Jr., Gabe Kapler, Jason Varitek, Luis Gonzalez, John Kruk, and other former teammates and coaches were either respectfully declined or not acknowledged.

Some members of the media, though, have been outspoken: Dan Shaughnessy has called Schilling " an actual menace to society "; Wallace Matthews challenged him to a fight . Several Hall of Fame voters—including Ken Rosenthal, the Fox Sports commentator who first covered Schilling during his rookie year in 1988 when Rosenthal was a writer for The Baltimore Sun—say that even though they will continue to vote for Schilling based on his merits, they're disgusted by his rhetoric. Jon Heyman, an MLB Network commentator, didn't vote for Schilling this year because of a tweet that endorsed lynching journalists.

But members of the media are the last people whose opinions Schilling cares about. To his mind, Breitbart is " the last bastion of actual journalism ," the lone outlet reporting the truth in a world of "fake news." "Just understand I'm not reading from The Onion or MAD magazine or any satirical website," he says on his show. "I'm reading from Breitbart."

Dina Litovsky

After the show, Schilling and I take a short ride in his black Ford F-150 to his farm about fifteen minutes down the road, where we encounter his alpacas, llamas, chickens, hogs, and goats. There's a pregnant white goat named Palin, in honor of former Alaska governor Sarah—"Mainly because she's a badass," Schilling says. The alpha of the stable is Coco, a tall brown alpaca who appears ready to spit at me at any moment. After calming Coco and feeding the herds, Schilling heads over to the other side of the building to meet the nearly one hundred chickens he raises, with names like Rocky, Jon Snow ("Because he's a bastard"), Gronk, and Channing Tatum. The chickens trail the owner, who's tossing them their dinner. Looking disheveled and carefree, chicken farmer Schilling is the version of the man that appears happiest and most at peace. Spending time with the animals has become the daily distraction that clears his head.

This fall will mark ten years since Schilling last threw a pitch. Since then, both he and Shonda have been treated for cancer, and his children have dealt with anorexia, hearing loss, and Asperger's. And then there was Schilling's first post-retirement career, which became such a fiasco that it haunts him to this day. "After he retired, things weren't good for us," Shonda says. "It wasn't good for each and every one of us."

John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe Getty Images

Encouraged by then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Schilling flirted with the idea of running for the Senate seat opened by Ted Kennedy's death in 2009, but ultimately declined to enter the race. In July of 2010, his video-game company, 38 Studios, which he had launched in 2007, had a huge breakthrough: a $75 million loan guarantee by the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation to move the firm's headquarters from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, which state officials promised would bring hundreds of jobs. But in the next two years, the company began to hemorrhage money, bouncing a loan payment check of more than $1 million and failing to meet payroll. Schilling began pouring in his own money to keep things afloat, selling a treasure trove of baseball memorabilia, but it wasn't enough. Less than two years after Rhode Island paid tens of millions of dollars to lure 38 Studios to the state, the company declared bankruptcy and laid off its entire staff , nearly four hundred people. Schilling lost $50 million of his own fortune. "That will go down as the most painful time in my life, by a long shot, because of how it ended," he says.

Todd McFarlane, the creator of the iconic comic book Spawn and the creative director of 38 Studios, says that, while Schilling was "terribly passionate" for the company and its employees, he was unprepared to oversee the financial side. "He didn't know how steep the mountain was," McFarlane says. "It was fun at the beginning and got more serious toward the end."

When 38 Studios went under, Schilling had already been at ESPN for two years, working as a baseball analyst on a salary of $2.5 million a year . In the release announcing his hiring, ESPN had touted Schilling's integrity , citing him as the recipient of the Roberto Clemente Award and the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, both MLB-wide prizes for character and leadership. In 2014, Schilling received a promotion: He was named the lead color analyst for Sunday Night Baseball. He'd miss a majority of that season because of a diagnosis of mouth cancer, but he returned to the booth before the end of the year. Schilling says he was responsible for making the feel of the show more like a team clubhouse. "They didn't want to hear me talk about David Price's ERA," he says. "I wanted to talk about stuff with Krukie [John Kruk] that we would be talking about on the bench."

Charles Krupa

That openness made Schilling a better commentator than many athletes who make the switch to broadcast, former colleagues say. "A lot of times, former players would come to ESPN and you could tell that they are uncomfortable with the position of being critical of current players," says Buster Olney, ESPN's in-game reporter for Sunday Night Baseball. "With Schill, you knew that wasn't going to be the case." Olney remembers Schilling calling one of Alex Rodriguez's first games following the announcement that the Yankees' third baseman would be suspended for the entire 2014 season for doping. When Red Sox starter Ryan Dempster threw behind A-Rod in the first pitch of his first at-bat, Schilling, without hesitation, said he was "pretty sure that was on purpose." Three pitches later, Dempster hit A-Rod, causing Schilling to describe the hit-by-pitch "as intentional as it gets." "I loved the fact that he would cut to the truth of what happened," Olney says. "I loved that he said what he believed."

He also wanted to talk about his political beliefs. In November of 2014, ESPN baseball writer Keith Law responded to a Schilling tweet advocating for the theory of creationism. Law, who had tweeted about the scientific evidence for evolution, was ordered by the network not to use Twitter for several days, while Schilling was not punished. "You didn't openly talk about Republican or conservative politics at ESPN, and I did," he tells me inside his truck, his three-pound Maltese, Ellie, sitting on my lap.

The first problem arose when, in August 2015, Schilling tweeted a comparison between Muslim extremists and Nazis. "It's said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How'd that go?" was written on a photo of Hitler giving a Nazi salute. Schilling added above the caption: "The math is staggering when you get to true #'s." Schilling deleted the tweet within minutes and apologized that same day, but the damage had been done. The next month, ESPN announced it had suspended Schilling for the rest of the 2015 regular season and the network's playoff coverage, though he was later reinstated for the playoffs .

Schilling said at the time he accepted ESPN's judgment, calling his tweet a "bad decision in every way on my part," but today he sounds far less contrite. "ESPN basically suspended me and, in doing so, told the public I was a racist," Schilling says. "That's what fucking pissed me off." In fact, ESPN's statement on his suspension didn't mention race, simply saying that Schilling's tweet was "completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company's perspective." But that incident marked a turning point in Schilling's public perception. "Calling me things that I'm not, like an asshole, that doesn't bother me," he tells me. "It's the racist thing, which I know is not true and people know is not true. But they say it anyway."

"We have someone in Curt Schilling who is a hero to a lot of people. We're going to amplify him however we can."

After he returned to the air, Schilling continued to share inflammatory memes on his Facebook page, criticizing Mexicans for trying to flee violence and Democrats' efforts to accept Syrian refugees into the country. In early 2016, ESPN released a memo asking its employees to refrain from discussing politics during the election year. A few weeks later, shortly before the start of the MLB season, Schilling said during a radio interview in Kansas City that Hillary Clinton should be "buried under a jail somewhere." This time, ESPN declined to suspend Schilling, saying only that management had addressed the issue with him, and he returned to the studio again.

But the next month, a post on Schilling's Facebook page shared an image of an overweight man dressed in a crude form of drag. "Let him in! to the restroom with your daughter or else you're a narrow minded, judgmental, unloving, racist bigot who needs to die!!!" the text said in all-caps. Schilling had added a caption to the post: "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."

The next day, ESPN fired him, citing his "unacceptable" conduct.

"My comment was, I don't need my government to tell me that men should pee in the men's rooms and women should pee in the women's rooms," he tells me now. "The photo was fucking meaningless to me, but I was transphobic after that, which I don't get." He pauses. "I guess you could call my social-media instincts Trumpian-like. I'm not saying that's a good thing."

But the same qualities that ESPN considered a problem helped Schilling land his next job nearly immediately. The same week he was fired, Schilling received a call from a producer at Breitbart, asking whether he'd come on Breitbart News Daily for an interview with then-host Steve Bannon, who was also Breitbart's executive chairman. After the interview, in which Schilling refused to back down from his comments, Bannon took him to lunch. They hit it off, and Breitbart offered him a job. "Steve brought Curt to prominence as a right-of-center speaker," says Alex Marlow, Breitbart's editor-in-chief. "Steve gets a lot of credit for that."

Dina Litovsky

Marlow says Breitbart wants "to make sure Schilling is a big presence" at the network, which has reached new highs since its former chairman became the president's right-hand man. "We have someone in Curt Schilling who is a hero to a lot of people and is willing to fight for their values," Marlow says. "We're excited and we're going to amplify him however we can."

Schilling could be in a position to fill an opening for conservative media's new power pundit. Glenn Beck has become an independent, going so far as to compare Trump to Hitler. Tomi Lahren, the 24-year-old once seen as Beck's rising star, is without a network after he fired her for questioning opposition to abortion. Milo Yiannopoulos lost a $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster and resigned from Breitbart after he was caught on tape defending pedophilia. Fox News icon Bill O'Reilly was forced out of Fox News for allegedly sexually harassing colleagues.

Now the question is whether Schilling wants to rise through the media ranks, or whether he'll go through with his plan to seek more formal political power. He is firm in his conviction that someone needs to take on Warren but says a decision about his own future will have to be made by his entire family. "I'll be consumed if I run," he says. "I won't have time to do anything else." And he believes in the power of Breitbart's platform. "Look, Obama blames talk radio for losing the election," he says. "If that's even part of the case, then God bless 'em. I think I played a little, small piece in that."

Dina Litovsky

Marlow acknowledges that a run against Warren would be an uphill climb, but he says Schilling would benefit from having Breitbart behind him. "I'm sure Steve would take a keen interest," he says. "I don't know if the administration would think it would make sense to endorse a candidate who would be a long shot. That said, a lot of people thought the same of President Trump."

Schilling's visit to the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year showed the benefits of aligning himself with Trump and Breitbart. Surrounded by throngs of people at Breitbart's spot on radio row, it is clear that Schilling is as much of a hero to far-right Republicans as he once was to Bostonians. "If I don't run, honest to God, I think it's one of those things that's badass cool that I can even say something like this," he tells me. "My thought was, I could run for [the] Senate next year and then I would run for president after Trump's second term. I live in a country where I can say that. That's pretty fucking cool."

Back in his home studio, Schilling is closing out his show with a rant against Black Lives Matter when Michael from Baltimore calls to dispute Schilling's false claim that there has been no increase in violence against black men nationwide. The exchange is a rare one: Over the course of three shows, this is the first time I've heard a listener call in to say that Schilling is wrong.

Flailing his arms and speaking even quicker than his usual breakneck pace, Schilling is clearly energized by the interaction. After he wraps up the call, he smiles and takes off his headphones. There's a look of relief on his face as he takes an audible, deep breath: "Those are the callers I want." He may not have changed the man's mind, but being able to have a conversation with someone who holds a different opinion is a step in the right direction. If he's going to run for office, Schilling knows, he will need to convince people to listen to him, even if they want to punch him in the face. "The show will be a way for me to figure out if I can be an elected official," he says, glancing over at his wife. "If my message resonates with people, then I know I'm right."

And if it doesn't?

"And if it doesn't," he says, "then I know I have been wrong my whole life."

Photography by Dina Litovsky.