Curt Schilling in an interview on Wednesday said that his being an outspoken Republican cost him as many as 100 votes in the most recent Hall of Fame balloting, whose results were announced the day before by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He added that John Smoltz, who was elected to the Hall and will be inducted along with three other players on July 26, benefited from being a Democrat. Schilling’s comments have provoked some eye rolling on social media, in the blogosphere, and from Keith Olbermann, a longstanding critic of the Hall election process.

Olbermann has a great changeup and could have thrown it here. He could have approached the Schilling kerfuffle from a different angle and sided with him, like Kennedy teaming up with Hatch to cosponsor legislation. “We agree that the process is broken, though our reasons for thinking so may be different.” Something like that. It would have been refreshing. Instead, the sports commentator and erstwhile lefty news commentator settled for playing to type.

Baseball writers lean left, ballplayers lean right. That’s the common wisdom. To support the first half of it, we have survey data showing that Democratic journalists outnumber Republican journalists four to one. To my knowledge we have no data on the party affiliation of the subset of journalists who are baseball writers. The preponderance of anecdotal evidence, however, for what that’s worth, seems to be that they’re mostly liberal. Speaking of his BBWAA colleagues, Rob Neyer admitted that, “yes, most of them probably did vote for Barack Obama.”

As for the assumption that most MLB players are politically conservative, Olbermann corroborates it with gusto, speaking from his long experience as a sports journalist. If the baseball writers who cast votes in Hall elections discriminated against conservative ballplayers, he quipped, “there would be about eight guys in Cooperstown.”

My first reaction was: It’s a matter of degree, Keith. Schilling wasn’t just another conservative in a baseball uniform. He was loud and political where others were quiet and politic. To those who disagree with his politics, Schilling tends to come across as a blowhard and whiner. I think he’s brave and forthright.

A friend tells me that Schilling’s career numbers aren’t good enough to qualify him for the Hall. Maybe. But his career words are the stuff of legend. En route to a world championship in 2001, he was asked about the “mystique and aura” of his team’s rival in the World Series. Schilling: “Those are dancers in a nightclub.”

Over at Fox Sports, Neyer questioned Schilling’s explanation for his failure to get elected to the Hall. Schilling now says he was speaking in jest: Of course he doesn’t really think his conservative politics cost him 100 votes, and of course he knows that Smoltz, who campaigned for Ralph Reed when Reed was running for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 2006, is no Democrat.

Olbermann insinuates that Schilling is only backpedaling. Neyer gives Schilling the benefit of the doubt. In a brief eruption of civility and courtesy on Twitter, he and No. 38 have reconciled. Look for uplift where you can find it.