Curt Schilling Versus Alex Rodriguez: Star Pitcher Tells Hilarious All Star Game Story

Curt Schilling: 1
Alex Rodriguez: 0

This past week on The Curt Schilling Baseball Show, the Cy-Young award winning, World Series Champion pitcher told a hilarious story about when he stared down Alex Rodriguez and became the victor during the 2002 All-Star Game.

At the time, the 35-year-old Schilling was pitching for the Arizona Diamondbacks while a 26-year-old A-Rod was with the Texas Rangers.

To his credit, this is when Alex Rodriguez was prime Alex Rodriguez. He would end up finishing that season with 57 home runs, 142 RBIs and 389 total bases - becoming the first player to lead the majors in all three categories since 1984.

Everyone knew how good A-Rod was, including Schilling. But anyone who follows Curt knows that he's not one to back down. He's also a little outspoken if you haven't heard - which is why he's perfect for OutKick.

Some might call it arrogance, but Schilling would probably call it just confidence with what he did next. Regardless of how you want to describe it, in the end, baseball fans won as two of the sport's all-time greats went at it. Literally.

CURT SCHILLING WANTED TO FACE THE BEST

"I went to the batting cages All-Star Game, and I didn't really know Alex but I knew he was hitting third and I said 'If you come up tomorrow and there's nobody on, I'm going to throw you nothing but fast balls," Schilling began. "And Alex kind of stepped back and looked at me and said 'what?'" before Schilling says he double downed and said "I'm not lying... I want to see if the best hitter in the world can hit my fast ball when he knows it's coming," before A-Rod responded "Alright."

"So he comes up the next day and if I remember right I started him out with 99mph and I think he took because he was like 'is this real?'" before Schilling then said he threw "three of the best pitches I could possibly throw as hard as I could possibly throw them," before striking him out on a 98 mph fastball on the inside corner to which Schilling chuckled, calling it "literally unhittable."

AT AN ALL-STAR GAME OF ALL PLACES!

"I remember thinking to myself 'alright, that was pretty cool...I just told the best hitter in the world 'here it comes,'" and was able to strike him out," Schilling proudly said on his podcast.

Let's be honest, sometimes sports these days feels like a lack of a competition. Obviously, athletes care about what they're doing, but the rise of analytics and built-in days off has taken a bit of the pure fight out of it - especially during the regular season.

So, the fact that you had Curt Schilling, who was already a 5x All-Star in 2002, as well as a World Series Champion and the 2x National League strikeout leader, challenging young gun Alex Rodriguez... is awesome. Especially since it happened at an All-Star game before there was really any importance to the game (home field advantage to the winning league didn't occur till after 2002).

Hearing Schilling say that he wanted to see for himself just how good Rodriguez was by lasering in multiple 95+ mph pitches brings a sense of refreshing nostalgia to the sport. Modern baseball fans recently got a similar feel when Shohei Ohtani faced his teammate, Mike Trout, during the World Baseball Classic. Once again, we saw the pitcher, Ohtani - just like Schilling - striking out the batter.