Hardball

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

During the decade in which Bell played for the Toronto Blue Jays, he was
a controversial figure. In this autobiography, written with the help of
Bob Elliott, Bell certainly shows why this was the case.

Elliott, a sports writer who has written for the Kingston
Whig-Standard, the Ottawa Journal, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Toronto
Sun, helps Bell explain his feelings and actions about baseball, his
childhood in the Dominican Republic, and his relationships with
management, other players, and fans. Bell is undoubtedly his own man.

His propensity for speaking his mind without necessarily thinking
beforehand emerges in the written word as well. His ongoing feuds with
the media (or, as he says, the “mediots”) and with former manager
Jimy Williams show Bell’s self-centred nature. He blasts the Blue
Jays’ pitchers for a lack of “intestinal fortitude” for not
supporting their teammates after they have been “thrown at” by
opposing pitchers. He also feels that being too religious can be
detrimental to ballplayers: it makes people “too nice.” (“God can
only look after so much,” he says. “Sometimes you have to stand up
for yourself.”)

Bell compares Canadians to Americans: “The Canadian people are really
low key. And they know a lot about countries other than their own. But
some American people are ignorant. They think they know everything, but
really all they know is one part of the world: the United States.”

In trying to explain his personality, Bell says “whatever I feel I
say and some people don’t like that.” In Hard Ball, Bell says much
that fans will not like, but then, baseball’s platitudes and clichés
are not what fans expect from this fierce and opinionated competitor.