He would hold one hand up, asking for time, while his back foot rubbed out the chalked rear line of the batter's box. That allowed him to stand a few inches farther back and buy a few more milliseconds to decipher the pitch. When he saw it and hit it, no one who ever played for the Indians did so with more power and consistency than Belle at his finest.
That was the Belle the Indians brought to spring training after years of mutual estrangement. Not the raging Belle, but the Belle of the ball. The idea was to restore relationships, to remind the kids of the proud times the franchise has experienced, to pass on tips, to represent. It is a generous move, and Belle seemed to appreciate it.
No one I have ever been around in sports on a daily basis was more committed to excellence at his craft than Albert Belle. No one subdued so many demons -- including alcoholism, a temper that could burn like a welder's torch and an unapproachable sullenness that discouraged friendship and denied him his just due. In the end, despite the damage he committed, Belle hurt himself with his tantrums most of all.
Those unproductive habits and emotions stopped in the batter's box. There, Belle was a predator, and the baseball had few avenues of escape. He kept detailed file cards of each at-bat; knew from them the situations and the tendencies of pitchers; and, in the year of the franchise's rebirth, in 1995, he almost never missed a mistake pitch.
Belle sought perfection, an impossible goal in a game in which error is officially assessed and tabulated. But Belle was not afraid of failing, either. He wanted the bat in his hands with the game on the line.
He played rough and angry, so he seemed like a throwback in a sport in which the commissioner wanted everyone to make nice after the 1994 players' strike canceled the World Series. Belle asked for no quarter and gave none. For serial indiscretions, he was suspended more often than a man on a flying trapeze.
The most serious incident came when he was found to be using a bat with more cork in it than a cellar full of vintage wine. Again, this was throwback stuff. Norm Cash of the Detroit Tigers won an American League batting title in 1961 with a bat adulterated with a mischievous mixture of sawdust, glue and cork.
Belle's impounded bat was stolen from a storage area at Chicago's Comiskey Park by Jason Grimsley, whose ninja skills in a ceiling air duct far outstripped those he possessed on the pitcher's mound. In the place of Belle's bat, Grimsley left a model belonging to first baseman Paul Sorrento. Omar Vizquel, in his tattle-tale book, said no clean Belle bat could be substituted because all of them would have bobbed in the turbulent seas of controversy, like corks.
The whole affair today has a quaint, roguish air. It was like a pitcher throwing an emery ball or spies stealing signs with the use of binoculars from peep holes in the scoreboard. Steroids and other designer performance-enhancing drugs were on the way. The greatest records in a game built on numbers would be trashed by a parade of artificially inflated musclemen.
When complaints by the Red Sox led umpires to confiscate another of Belle's bats in the 1995 divisional playoffs, umpires sawed the bat in half and found it was clean. Belle pointed angrily to his bulging biceps as the cause of the homer he had just hit. The muscles were legit. No hint of steroid abuse ever arose about him.
Belle (deep breath here) got thrown out of the Rookie League and the Mexican League; cussed out television reporter Hannah Storm before a World Series game; tried to make road pizza of two trick-or-treaters outside his home; winged a photographer with one baseball and a taunting fan with another; backhanded another man (Note to hecklers: Leave Albert alone!) with a ping pong paddle; busted up clubhouses; and was just an unholy distraction ... until it came time to produce with the bat. He should have won a couple of Most Valuable Player awards, but his personality prevented that.
The Indians remember his tunnel vision in the box. The fans remember his shots over the wall. I remember how little he cared about being loved, only respected and, undeniably, feared.
It wasn't fun covering Belle. But it was never, ever dull, and you can't say that about the team these days.
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