With a handful of ailing teammates back home in Boston and one in the hospital, Curt Schilling had a tough time celebrating his latest pitching feat. The Boston ace became the 14th pitcher in major league history to reach 3,000 strikeouts Wednesday when he fanned Oakland's Nick Swisher in the first inning of the Red Sox's 7-2 loss to the Athletics. "It's very bittersweet," Schilling said after Boston lost its sixth straight game and 12th in 14. "This definitely was a day when this team needed a chance to step up, and I didn't. When 14 people in the history of the game have done it, that makes me proud to have achieved it. But going through what we're going through and doing what I did today kind of sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of it -- most of it, if not all of it."