Accused of giving away his team’s pitches, Derek Bender reckons with the world’s mistrust

SCHENECTADY, New York — Every once in a while, Derek Bender will send a text to one of his former teammates. Or he’ll call, and leave a voicemail.

But, after what happened on Sept. 6, he has not received one text back. Not one call. He’s been left on read, a ghosted pariah to a team that has nothing left to do with him.

More than five months have passed since the day the former Minnesota Twins minor league catcher was accused of giving away pitches to opposing batters on the Lakeland Flying Tigers, trying to ensure his team would miss the playoffs so a long, tiring season would end, according to the allegations against him. A week later, he was released, barely a month after receiving a $297,500 signing bonus as a sixth-round draft selection.

Since then, Bender has existed in a kind of baseball limbo: technically still a professional baseball player, but shunned by the rest of that fraternity. He’s reached out to players in his draft class, guys he lived with at the spring training complex, friends and teammates.

Silence.

“There are a lot of times where you’re talking with people that you thought you were friends with, they just don’t look at you the same,” Bender said. “I’ve heard my friends get questioned about me, why they’re still friends with me. That’s hard to hear.

“It’s not like I’m getting accused of committing a crime.”

Bender is right. He faces no legal consequences. He broke no laws.

But he is accused of betraying the people he worked with. He is accused of undermining every single one of them, all to deliberately lose a game, stay out of the playoffs and ensure a competitive season would come to an early end. The game’s history is filled with players who are accused of cheating for their own benefit. This stands out even among those.

Bender is trying to stay in baseball, and he is trying to regain some level of control over his life. But he is also coming to terms with his situation: That for the rest of his life, in a professional or personal environment, those around him may have a nagging thought in the back of their minds.

Can he be trusted?

When the story of the Twins minor league catcher accused of selling out his own team went viral on ESPN in September, Bender declined to comment. He hasn’t spoken at all about the matter until agreeing to a February interview with The Athletic in his rented house near Albany, New York.

Major League Baseball has been investigating Bender for months for a violation of Rule 21(a), which prohibits players from intentionally losing games, or attempting to lose games. And because it remains ongoing, the Twins, Tigers, MLB and players’ union all declined to comment for this story.

League sources briefed on the investigation say the inquiry has uncovered evidence against Bender. More than a dozen people have spoken to investigators, including multiple with direct knowledge of the alleged conduct. Notably, there was no video broadcast of the game, despite the other five games in that series being aired. If the league finds he violated the rules, he’d be looking at a permanent ban, with the opportunity to apply for reinstatement after a year.

For the first 25 minutes of a 90-minute interview, the conversation circled around the only truly relevant question. He talked of his practices with the Siena College baseball team. Spoke of the hours leading up to his final game with the Twins.

Finally it came time to ask the question that Bender had yet to proactively answer himself.

“You were accused of giving away pitches as they were coming up to bat. Did that happen?”

“No,” Bender said, with an almost indignant chuckle. “And I’ll live with this until the day I die. I never gave pitches away. I never tried to give the opposing team an advantage against my own team.”

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On the morning of Sept. 6, Bender wanted the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels’ season to be over. He’d said as much to teammates, joking prior to their doubleheader against Lakeland that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if they let a grounder slip under their gloves.

A couple losses would eliminate them from playoff contention, and that’s exactly what Bender was counting on. But he says he wasn’t serious, and he wasn’t talking about actually throwing a game. His desire to leave was rooted in a need for a reset that he felt would help improve his game.

“A lot of us are coming off of college seasons, coming off of a pretty grueling summer schedule,” Bender said. “Then you get there and you’re hitting .200, you’re facing some of the best stuff consistently you’ve ever seen. You’re sinking or swimming, and you’re pretty close to sinking.

“The conversations are that everybody’s ready to go home.”

It was immaturity like this, he said, that came to define his final week in Fort Myers. He’d verbally sparred with player development coaches, arguing with them on his offensive approach.

During a rain delay two days prior, he’d done a tarp slide on Lakeland’s field — a huge no-no.

“That’s sometimes what you get with Derek. You get a lot of emotion, a lot of personality,” said longtime hitting coach and family friend Dan Sausville. “He’s a bold dude. … I gave him lots of advice to keep his mouth shut when he got to the minor leagues. I had given Derek some good advice, that he didn’t take.”

Sausville said that Bender was “in a bad place” that week, and that he had texted with one of Bender’s agents, discussing how Bender clearly needed to get home.

Bender was called into his manager’s office following that doubleheader against Lakeland. Lakeland manager Andrew Graham had informed his Fort Myers counterpart that his players heard Bender giving away pitches before they were thrown. Bender said he immediately denied it. Attempts to reach Graham and Fort Myers manager Brian Meyer for comment were unsuccessful.

The Athletic also attempted to contact numerous players and coaches from both teams, as well as the home plate umpire; none could be reached for comment.

Bender said there was nothing he said that could be interpreted as giving away pitches, and he couldn’t think of any reason why someone would make it up.

Fort Myers had already lost six games in a row. And starter Ross Dunn, who had a 6.46 ERA, was yanked in the second inning after allowing five of the first seven batters that frame to reach in the 6-0 loss. His 1 2/3 innings matched his shortest start of the season.

Bender wasn’t allowed in the dugout the following two games. He watched from the bullpen as the season wrapped up. At first, he said, some teammates had his back. But support started to dwindle.

“I talked to him,” Bender said of his attempt at a conversation with Dunn. “I told him, ‘Whatever you’re hearing, it’s just not true. I wouldn’t do that.’ And he said, ‘I hope not, but it’s just what I’m hearing. But I hope not.’

“It’s the last time I’ve heard from him.”

Dunn could not be reached for comment.

When the season officially ended, Bender packed up. There were no heartfelt goodbyes. “I wanted to get the hell out.”

The Twins, Bender said, were willing to keep him in the organization. But they had one requirement. He needed to admit to everything and apologize for it.

He tried to own up to it, he said. He apologized. But when the club asked what he was sorry for, he came up empty. The Twins, team sources said, had already conducted an internal investigation led by GM Jeremy Zoll. In their mind, this was no longer just a question of immaturity. This was a player they could no longer employ.

“The only thing I had left was my character at that point,” Bender said. “Literally, the way they put it was, ‘If you want to die by the sword, we’ll release you.’ I knew there was no bluffing involved.”

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It used to be cool to know Derek Bender, a hometown hero on a big-league path.

He played just one year of high school ball at St. James High School in South Carolina, but remains in the program’s Hall of Fame.

“He set the tone in our program for how to work, different from any player we’ve had before,” said St. James head coach Robbie Centracchio.

Bender moved on to Coastal Carolina University, a baseball program that has produced major leaguers Tommy La Stella, Taylor Motter and Kirt Manwaring, among others, and won a national championship in 2016. Bender broke out for CCU in 2023 with 19 home runs and then excelled in the Cape Cod League that summer. There was talk of him as a Day 1 selection in the MLB Draft. The Twins were intrigued by the power potential in his right-handed bat.

Now, he doesn’t leave the one-bedroom home he’s rented without his hood up, fearing that even a friendly chat might be had with someone secretly assuming the worst. He said he feels guilty because photos of him in his Coastal Carolina uniform were being used in news articles.

He’s spent the whole offseason running from this. Weeks of sleeping on couches of his friends’ college apartments in Toledo and Richmond to avoid going home.

He didn’t want to go back to his parents in South Carolina, a place so closely associated with a sport he’d begun to believe he’d never play again. Bender’s parents have taken his situation hard. His father, Dennis checks MLB’s press releases every day to see if there’s an announcement from the league about his status, and has met with a lawyer about possible steps to sue. His mother, Diane, says she wakes up in the middle of the night and cries.

“It breaks my heart for my kid,” Diane said, “that it’s a possibility that he might not be able to play this game again at a high level. Because that’s all he ever wanted to do.”

Instead of moving back in with his family, he crashed with a childhood friend in Albany, New York, where he’d grown up.

“I wanted to be around my friends,” Bender said. “… I wanted to be somewhere where baseball didn’t matter as much.”

Bender’s rental house isn’t messy, but isn’t clean either. There’s an uneaten and unheated burrito on his plate, and a jumbo Chick-Fil-A cup rests on a small table in front of the chair where he sits. He’s wearing Timberland boots, black cargo pants and a t-shirt.

The fact that he was speaking publicly at all was so controversial within his own circles that he said he was unable to sleep the night prior.

For months, Bender’s agency, Octagon, strongly advised him against doing an interview. They wanted to wait until the league resolved its investigation into him.

Bender took their advice, until he didn’t. Torn between the instinct to give his side, and the need for patience, eventually he decided he couldn’t wait any longer.

“It’s about gaining control over my life,” Bender said. “And this whole situation. I’m not doing this as a last-ditch effort to get back into affiliate ball. It’s more of this is the start of me taking control of my life again. Because I’ve let this completely control me for months now.”

His primary agent, Jake Rosner, said he was unaware the interview had taken place. And after The Athletic reached out to Rosner to request comment, Octagon dropped Bender as a client.

“We would have preferred that he not do any media requests or sit down with anyone from the media until this investigation was closed,” said Rosner, adding that it indicated to them he was no longer taking Octagon’s advice.

“We don’t make comments when investigations are ongoing,” Rosner said. “That simple.”

Even though he is denying the allegations now, Bender said he trusted Octagon’s advice at the time, which is why he declined to comment when the story first broke.

What came after Bender’s no-comment to ESPN was something Bender never anticipated. He says he was unaware of the reporter Jeff Passan, a prominent and well-sourced baseball writer. As a result, Bender didn’t understand the reach his story would garner.

That is, until about 10 p.m. that evening, when he was hanging out with friends. There, he experienced the surreal feeling of getting a push notification about himself.

Almost immediately, aggregated articles started pouring in from news outlets all over the country. Messages on all of his social media accounts. Bender and his buddies sat and watched it unfold in real time.

“I had to go dark for at least three days,” Bender said. “I had to private all my social media accounts. I was getting death threats and awful, obscene things said to me.”

The vitriol has simmered, as expected. The world has moved on from this story in a way that Bender still can’t.

And now with no agent and a shredded reputation, Bender awaits MLB’s verdict. He sat down with investigators in November, going over that inning pitch-by-pitch. Trying to convince them that he is innocent, with the possibility of a career-ending ban if they decide otherwise.

“I feel like my whole life has been centered around baseball, and for good reason, “ Bender said.

“This whole situation made me fall out of love with it. But I realized that I want to win more baseball games in my career. I love baseball. I love winning. I love being a part of a team. There’s nothing more I want to do.”

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In the back of Bender’s car is a large Twins duffel bag that still carries all of his baseball equipment.

His relationship with the team that gave him a chance is complicated. In one breath, he’s complimentary: “I don’t fault anybody in the Twins organization. I think they handled it well.”

But in another, he says the exact opposite. “It never really felt like the Twins had my back.”

It remains a very real possibility that Bender’s Twins bag will be the last big league gear he’ll ever receive. He’s done the obvious calculation in his mind. This never would have happened to a first-round pick, he said. But a sixth-round pick? There’s no impetus for another team to take him on.

The sport of baseball could very easily continue on without Derek Bender.

“That’s the reality of it,” he said, fully accepting of that fact.

This accusation could follow him throughout his life, a detriment to any career path. The longtime hockey fan wants to someday be a psychologist for NHL players. But at just 22 years old, Bender views his next job as a chance at redemption. He’ll earn just $1,200 this summer playing independent ball for the Brockton Rox of the Frontier League. It’s a move that’s more about proving to himself and everyone else just how much he cares about winning.

Even with a GM and coach who have known Bender for years, Brockton is playing this cautiously. And nothing is guaranteed until he actually takes the field. The results of MLB’s investigation could impact his ability to play, or Brockton’s desire to have him.

“I think the biggest thing was being willing to give a guy a second chance, to do what he’s trained his whole life to do, and what he loves,” said Rox GM Jerod Edmondson, who said he didn’t investigate the allegations before adding Bender. “I think everybody makes mistakes. He’s 22 years old.”

Sausville is Brockton’s hitting coach. There were stretches in which the two talked 20 times a day. And as a longtime confidant of Bender’s, he believes in his innocence. Even if MLB eventually says he’s guilty, Sausville will welcome him.

But he’s not blind to the circumstances that led Bender here, and remains open to the idea that there could be more to this accusation than he knows.

“After this is all said and done, he needs to sit in the mirror and ask himself: why isn’t everyone jumping up to stick up for me?” Sausville said.

“I think a lot of it comes from selfish immaturity. And also a one-track mind of, ‘I’m trying to make the big leagues … and I don’t care who I piss off on the way there.”

Bender wants to prove he can still be a catcher, even though he knows his only path might be a move to first base, recognizing that pitchers will be apprehensive to throw to him.

He wants to tell the world that he’s a person who loves those close to him. “I’m a loving friend, I’m a caring person. I’m a guy that (teammates) want in their foxhole.”

He wants people to accept that he’s a changed athlete, who’s done complaining about having to play. “You’ll never hear that come out of my mouth again,” he said. “I’ve worked really hard for this, and I don’t want it all to go away because of one accusation.”

But, he said, he doesn’t feel like he owes it to anyone to plead his innocence.

Bender might not feel an obligation to prove his credibility. But it nonetheless is something that, with every word he says, will be continuously scrutinized. It is not going away.

So, ultimately the question remains.

Can he be trusted?

“People will think whatever they want to think, whether I say it or not,” he said.

“Like let’s be honest. Nobody’s ever going to be here and say ‘Yeah, I did it.’ Most of the time, people are going to deny, deny, deny. People are going to make their decisions, whether I say it or not.”

The Athletic’s Dan Hayes contributed reporting to this story.

(Top Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photo: Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images)

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