Derek Bell’s life is different these days, a sizable departure from the last time he appeared in a Major League Baseball game. Cataracts have wreaked havoc on the 51-year-old’s eyes, forcing him to quit his job as an assistant high school baseball coach in Tampa, Fla., and requiring the assistance of his fiancée to get around. Bell said he needs surgery but must wait until after the COVID-19 pandemic lessens before he can get it.
Bell has also sold his legendary yacht, a 58-foot monster named “Bell 14” on which he hosted parties, lived during spring training and displayed a penchant for the spoils of playing professional baseball.
What hasn’t left Bell, however, is his infamous “Operation Shutdown” line and how he’s unable to shake both its existence and his horrific performance in Pittsburgh, a career coda where Bell “hit” .173 in 2001 and was released the following March when he seemed to chafe at the idea of competing for the starting job in right field.
Bell doesn’t believe what he meant was properly conveyed in that quote, which was delivered to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Robert Dvorchak for a story on March 18, 2002. Most others, including one of Bell’s former teammates, believe he meant what he said, and Dvorchak did nothing wrong.
Whether his words were misconstrued or not, Bell insisted that it still gnaws at him how poorly things ended in Pittsburgh and had a message for Pirates fans that he repeated several times throughout a lengthy phone conversation with the Post-Gazette on Monday.
“I do want to apologize and let Pirates fans know that I’m very, very sorry that I didn’t live up to that contract,” said Bell, who had signed a two-year, $9.75 million deal with the Pirates and was hitting .148 with no extra-base hits in 27 spring training at-bats before he was released. “They expected me to do more, and I didn’t get a chance to do more.
“It haunts me to this day that I didn’t get a chance to show ’em because Pittsburgh is a great city. It’s a steel town. They love their sports. They love their players. They just want you to do well.”
It’s been nearly 20 years out of baseball for Bell, who also played for the Blue Jays, Padres, Astros and Mets during an 11-year career. The journey ended when the Pirates released Bell and cut bait on their big offseason catch from the previous winter.
Bell said he spent 15 or so years helping his good friend, Ty Griffin, coach baseball at his alma mater, C. Leon King High School in Tampa, and also Tampa Catholic High School, but eventually he had to quit because of the demands on his arms, legs and eyes.
Drug troubles found Bell during the middle part of the previous decade. He was caught with a warm crack pipe in his car during an April 2006 traffic stop. He was arrested again in December 2008 on three more counts of possessing drug paraphernalia and also failing to appear in court earlier that year.
Asked about those issues Monday, Bell chalked them up to having a little too much free time on his hands and said he’s moved past the entire ordeal.
“Things happen,” Bell said. “I was retired. Sometimes when you retire, you want to have fun. I never got in trouble when I played ball. I never did drugs when I played ball. I ran into a little rut. You do the wrong thing, and things happen. I’ve moved past that. Lesson learned. I’m moving on way beyond that.”
How it happened
After a career-worst year — one that included just 27 hits, a .288 slugging percentage and a demotion to Class AAA — the Pirates understandably wanted Bell to earn the job in right field and prove he deserved to start over Armando Rios, Craig Wilson or Rob Mackowiak.
Meanwhile, Bell was signed by Cam Bonifay, who was replaced by Dave Littlefield as Pirates general manager on June 11, 2001. In essence, Littlefield had no loyalty to Bell, and his reputation wasn’t tethered to this deal working out or not.
Littlefield would later explain that Bell was in competition for a starting job, although first let’s present the full version of what the veteran outfielder said in Dvorchak’s story.
“Nobody told me I was in competition,” Bell said. “If there is competition, somebody better let me know. If there is competition, they better eliminate me out of the race and go ahead and do what they’re going to do with me. I ain’t never hit in spring training and I never will.
“Ask Littlefield and ask [manager Lloyd McClendon] if I’m in competition. If it ain’t settled with me out there, then they can trade me. I ain’t going out there to hurt myself in spring training battling for a job. If it is [a competition], then I’m going into ‘Operation Shutdown.’ Tell them exactly what I said. I haven’t competed for a job since 1991. If I don’t [start], then I guess I’ll be out of here.”
Littlefield was asked for his assessment of Bell’s status.
“Derek Bell is certainly competing for playing time out there,” Littlefield said. “At this point, he hasn’t done a lot to show he deserves a lot of playing time. He just hasn’t performed. Last year, he was injured. He looks healthy. We just have to see more production.”
Bell contends that he was using a hip-hop term and wishes Dvorchak would’ve asked him to clarify what exactly he meant. The outfielder has also never retracted his comments, arguing instead that he misspoke, and people, for whatever reason, took them an incorrect way.
“I worded it wrong, but I’ve always been that way,” Bell said. “I say what’s on my mind.”
Bell contended that he was dealing with a nagging hamstring injury and wouldn’t have been physically able to compete for a job. He also said he had a specific routine for how he’d like to get ready for a season ... and that generally didn’t include achieving very good results during spring training.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to compete for the job, I’m going to shut down and get myself strong, get my legs together, go out there and take extra batting practice,’ ” Bell said Monday. “Shut it down for a week or two, then the last few weeks of spring training, show ’em what I’m all about.”
Littlefield certainly didn’t help the believability factor when he tacitly endorsed/validated the “Operation Shutdown” quote by saying at the time, “Obviously, everybody’s frustrated with Derek’s comments. ”
Different perspective
Jack Wilson believed Bell meant what he said, but he did have a few things to add.
Wilson was a rookie in 2001 and got to know Bell with Class AAA Nashville when the latter was demoted. The former Pirates shortstop grew to really like Bell, calling him a “great guy” and an “awesome teammate” and said that Bell took it upon himself to help Wilson with his swing.
“The guy worked his butt off,” Wilson said. “He took early batting practice. He watched film. He’d even watch my film and bring me in and talk to me about my swing, about what he thought we could do differently. He became a hitting coach for me, and I ended up hitting [.369] in Class AAA before I got called back up.”
As for the context around Bell’s comments, Wilson believed Bell made them out of frustration. After a wretched 2001, Bell had clearly spent time in the weight room that offseason, Wilson said, and appeared ready to atone for such an awful season.
“It looked like he was driven to prove everybody wrong. That’s what I saw,” Wilson said. “I saw a guy who was crazy determined.”
And eventually a veteran who was hacked off at the idea of having to compete for time, either in right field or for a bench role because of one bad year.
“He said what he was feeling, and I think he felt really disrespected,” Wilson said. “I think he started thinking, ‘Screw this. I bust my butt, and I still don’t get an opportunity. Screw it.’
“I think it was true to his heart that, yeah, ‘I’m shutting it down because this is BS.’ But I just don’t think people understand what led to that.”
‘Dreams about it’
Bell’s life certainly isn’t as glorious as one of his former Mets teammates, Todd Zeile, explained it to be during an appearance on MLB Network two years ago.
Zeile said Bell would have his paychecks cashed by clubhouse attendants, and he’d travel with a wad of bills. He’d purchase loud-colored suits, wearing the yellow or orange numbers just once before giving them away to teammates. A 2000 New York Times profile on Bell said he owned more than 100 pairs of alligator shoes.
The yacht was a floating embodiment of Bell’s desire to soak up the lifestyle, and he kept it docked at Twin Dolphin Marina on the Manatee River when he took part in Pirates spring training in Bradenton, Fla. But once Bell retired, it became a little too onerous.
“It got old,” Bell said. “My buddies got jobs. I didn’t have nobody to go out with me. I did it for a while, then once you’re around it every day, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, man. This is too much work.’ ”
Bell says he’ll occasionally do autograph shows around Tampa and is routinely spotted in public. Many times it’s because of what he accomplished elsewhere, like when he was teammates with Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio in Houston, part of the “Killer B’s.”
It’s not uncommon for fans to ask Bell to write “Operation Shutdown” on hats or balls, which he said he has no problem doing even as he tries to explain he meant something else. “I’m a fan-friendly person,” Bell said.
Pirates fans would likely use slightly different terms to describe Bell, not all of them printable in a family newspaper. One that all parties could probably agree on is big-time bust, and Bell said that’s what irritates him the most about his time here: the fact that he knows he was really bad and is remembered for all the wrong reasons.
“The situation, I came in as a free agent, trying to live up to the contract,” Bell said. “They loved [incumbent John] Vander Wal, who played right field the year before and did well. I was pressing. I never pressed in my career before. I always performed to my ability and tried to keep everyone loose.
“I sincerely apologize. I have dreams about it, having a good season in Pittsburgh. I was poised to do that the next year, but I just think my words got misconstrued, and I have to live with it.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: May 12, 2020, 5:04 p.m.
