Blue Jays Give Bell His Way, but Not Pitchers

Now that the tantrums have ceased, the booing quieted and the lineup re-aligned to please him, there’s still the matter of the big guy and his slump.

Or, when will the pop of George Bell’s bat equal that of his mouth?

His slump has gone on so long and looked so bad at times that, in this city where fans sometimes wait two hours to buy an outfield seat 600 feet from home plate, he has begun to get the Eddie Murray treatment: Is he too fat? Can he see the ball? Is he trying to do too much or, worse, too little?

A year after he was voted the American League’s most-valuable player, after he hit 47 home runs and looked as if he might be one of the game’s next dominant players, he has eight--three of those in an opening-day performance that would make “Bull Durham” proud.

Since then, Bell has five in 71 games--none of them at Exhibition Stadium, where the fans have alternately cheered and booed since a highly publicized spring pout over whether he should consent to being used as a designated hitter.

Worse, he has chased breaking pitches from Yonge Street to Fort York, and each time he lunges at another one, an inquiring mind sits behind home plate writing a note that will be passed to another pitching staff. The message: Throw him pitches out of the strike zone. He may not hit it, but if he does, it’s more likely to be a single to right than a homer to left.

“I’ve been brutal,” Bell said in a rare interview this week. “I’m missing pitches I didn’t miss last year. They’re not pitching me any different, nothing like that. I’m just not getting the job done. The fans can boo all they want. I’ve given them a reason to boo, haven’t I?”

That he has. In his fifth full season, the smiles have come more easily, the words more freely for George Antonio Bell, who is 28, occasionally 28 going on 12.

He can be funny and articulate one moment, as when he accepted the MVP award in New York last winter, or he can be surly and unapproachable, as he was throughout spring training. He can take young Latins under his wing and show them how to hail a taxi or deal with the media, but one wrong move by management can trigger a screaming tantrum or a weeklong sulk.

“He’s a good guy,” said teammate Jesse Barfield, “but he does have a temper. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing to have in a team sport.”

Bell’s story is so complicated and includes so many subplots and twists that it’s hard to pick it up anywhere except at the beginning.

For the Blue Jays, that would be the final week of last season, which was supposed to be the beginning of something special, but became a brush fire of embarrassing moments.

They needed two victories in their last seven games to clinch the American League East championship, which they led by 3 1/2 games with seven left. They needed one victory to tie. They got none and are believed to be the first team in history to finish 0-7 and lose a division championship because of it.

The Blue Jays were forced to play without shortstop Tony Fernandez and catcher Ernie Whitt, who both suffered season-ending injuries in September. But there were other factors, one of them being Bell, who hit his 47th homer in the Blue Jays’ 152nd game, then went three for 27 with no extra-base hits as the division was slipping into the hands of the Detroit Tigers.

It would get worse. He signed a two-year, $3.9 million contract last winter and was told the club wanted him to serve as a part-time designated hitter. The Blue Jays said the shift was not a demotion so much as taking advantage of an opportunity to save the wear and tear on his knees while opening a spot for one of their talented young outfielders.

Bell said he thought he would DH “a few games,” but when he showed up at spring training, reporters asked him about being a full-time DH. He said he knew nothing about that, then, in a couple of embarrassing incidents, refused to DH, then publicly ripped Manager Jimy Williams, saying he’d be around longer and would still be in the outfield when Williams was an ex-manager.

The Blue Jays made a few attempts to trade him, but eventually relented and put Bell back in left field. That move didn’t sit well with a lot of his teammates, who privately wondered who was running the team--Bell or the people paid to run it.

“It definitely could have been handled better,” Blue Jays pitcher Mike Flanagan said. “I don’t know if it hurt us, but you don’t need those distractions.”

All of that was forgotten when Bell became the first player ever to homer three times on opening day. He followed that with the first five-hit game of his career, but since then has struggled. The slump is made even worse because right fielder Barfield hasn’t hit, either, and the Blue Jays, a team favored to win the AL East, have been in sixth place since April 30.

Scouts have wondered if Bell, coming off an MVP season and with a fat new contract in his pocket, isn’t trying too hard. At least one scout has instructed his team to stop throwing Bell strikes, his opinion being that Bell will swing at bad pitches.

Bell doesn’t deny that, but says, “I hit those same pitches last year. I’m not thinking about the MVP. I was glad to get it, but I’m not trying to prove I should have won it. I did win it. It’s just that we’re all struggling right now, and people look for someone to blame.

“I have to give credit to the pitchers. They’re doing what they have to do. Maybe I have to change my thinking about the plate. That’s the point of the slump to me. It’s not the contract or the MVP. It’s me.”

He shrugs off the Blue Jays’ bad start, saying, “Look what happened to Oakland. Everybody thought they were going to win by a hundred games, and it’s a close race again. The other teams in this division know we’re going to be around. We got a couple of pitchers (Jimmy Key and Jeff Musselman) out, and, if we play like we’re supposed to, we’ll win.”

Before actually winning the award, he had wondered if a Dominican could get it. He said recognition had always come slowly for Latins and that given a close choice he might lose to Detroit’s Alan Trammell.

“That’s just the way it’s going to be,” he said. “I’m proud of where I’m from, and I’m happy to bring the award to the Dominican.”

He attempts to continue that baseball heritage each winter by returning there with trunks of shoes, gloves and bats he has gotten from teammates. He told an interviewer last summer that reporters sometimes misunderstand the importance of baseball in the Dominican, but that some understanding of it was required to understanding George Bell.

“To a young boy,” he said, “it’s part of his education. My sister is in medical school, but to me baseball was going to be my living if I was good enough to make it. I’ve made it and maybe I can help others make it.”