This was an article on Belle I remember seeing at some point. While Belle's behavior certainly was "bad" there was a whole other side of him that never gets talked about.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-687570109b21/
It really boiled down to Belle's predisposition of hate towards media. I remember reading somewhere else that he could never understand why people wanted to ask him things, hear his life story, and write his responses down. His job, he felt, was to play baseball and entertain the fans with his bat, not his mouth. While I don't agree with his methodology, I will say he was right, and it is refreshing when athletes don't use their stardom to suddenly become self proclaimed experts about politics (ahem, Schilling). He was there to play baseball, and on most days he saw the media as interfering with that. He was not the guy to stop to ask questions to while he's walking to the batting cage to get some cuts in, because he was there to practice...and a reporter asking him questions would be interfering with that. And the only way he knew how to respond to this was by being angry.