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.
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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, N.Y.
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.”
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 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.”
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 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.
