PHILADELPHIA — Lynette Reid doesn’t like clutter. She keeps a tidy home in western South Dakota, and is quick to toss out anything she doesn’t need. But for the past 12 years, she has held on to an old cardboard box in her garage.
She isn’t sure why. Inside it are files that lay out, in painstaking detail, the worst day of her life: Jan. 22, 2010. Her husband, David, and her son, Garrett, were driving home from the movies. They were approaching Steele Canyon High School, near San Diego, when a red Ford Mustang suddenly collided with their Dodge Caravan.
The driver of the Mustang, 18-year-old Andrew Bellatti, was not drunk. He was not on drugs. He was just running late. As Bellatti approached the high school, a car pulled out of the entrance. It was a rainy day and the roads were slick, so he didn’t want to hit his brakes. As he accelerated, and veered across the double yellow line to pass, he lost control of his car. Garrett broke several bones. David died at age 50.
Lynette, 59, has shuffled through that box maybe two or three times since the accident. But one night in late June, she found herself shuffling through it again, and came across a letter that Bellatti sent her from jail. The first thing she noticed was his cursive. It was remarkably neat for a teenager. Every word was carefully crafted in pencil, with not a comma or a period out of place.
The second thing she noticed was his empathy. It wasn’t just that Bellatti was apologizing profusely; it was that he made an attempt to put himself in her position. He told her he couldn’t sleep because of what he had done. He told her it would live with him for the rest of his life.
“You don’t deserve this at all,” Bellatti wrote. “I can’t imagine how my mom would feel if my dad was gone.”
When Lynette first read Bellatti’s letter, in 2010, she was moved. Initially, he was facing vehicular manslaughter charges that could have sent him to prison for five years, but she knew that wasn’t what David would have wanted. So, she asked the judge to reduce Bellatti’s sentence. She wanted him to be home by Christmas.
“It was just bad luck,” she said. “It was a bad accumulation of things. The placement of the high school, the rain. There was no malice, it was just an accident. He was a baby. I wanted him to have a life.”
As Lynette read Bellatti’s letter again, in 2022, she wondered what he was up to. She knew that he was playing minor league baseball in the Tampa Bay Rays organization at the time of the accident, but didn’t know where his career had gone from there. She asked her husband, John, to look into it. He returned a few minutes later.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
A new Phillies fan
When the Phillies signed Bellatti to a minor league contract in November 2021, the transaction was announced with little to no fanfare. Major League Baseball was about to go into a lockout, and once that was over, Phillies fans turned their attention to the free-agent signings of Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos. But Bellatti, then a 30-year-old journeyman with just 20 games of big league experience, quietly proved to be a reliable reliever.
He was called up in mid-April, and stayed with the Phillies for the rest of the 2022 season, posting a 3.31 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Bellatti became someone manager Rob Thomson could trust in high-leverage situations. And that was how he was used on June 26, when Lynette came across his letter.
The Phillies were playing in Petco Park earlier that day. Thomson called on Bellatti to close the game, and he did just that, earning the save with 14 pitches, no hits and no runs. When John relayed this to Lynette, a few hours later, she was filled with pride. She had no idea that Bellatti was still in the big leagues, let alone pitching in their hometown San Diego.
“To come back from that nightmare, and to be able to pitch for a major league team, and get the save, it was just amazing,” she said.
Lynette started tuning into Phillies games regularly from that point on. She’d check their box scores and look at highlights online. During the playoffs, she watched the Phillies from her living room TV in South Dakota. Whenever she saw Bellatti warming up in the bullpen, she’d run into the kitchen until his outing was over.
“I would get so nervous for him,” she said. “It’s sort of like watching your kids play.”
John would tell her when it was safe to come back, and then would provide a summary of Bellatti’s outing. It was often a good summary. In his first career MLB postseason, Bellatti allowed just one earned run and one walk in seven innings. He was as locked in as he’d ever been.
And Lynette loved to see it. She’d watch clips of his postseason outings, laughing with delight as batter after batter tried, and failed, to hit Bellatti’s slider.
“They were all over the place,” she said. “A foot away from the ball.”
By the end of the Phillies’ postseason run, Lynette had fallen thoroughly in love with baseball again. Growing up in western Nebraska, she spent her summer nights keeping score for a local team. After graduating from the U.S. Navy’s basic corpsman school, she was stationed in San Diego as an ultrasound technician, and began going to Padres games.
Lynette was a regular at Jack Murphy Stadium, where she watched Tony Gwynn, Trevor Hoffman, and Ken Caminiti in the prime of their careers, but became disillusioned after 1998, when the Padres traded away some of their best players.
Decades later, it was Bellatti — the man who went to jail for taking her husband’s life — who reignited her love for the game. There are some who can’t understand why she is so forgiving. She feels those people are missing the point.
“They don’t understand the whole situation,” she said. “His age, the slippery road, they just don’t get everything. It’s easy to be judgmental when you don’t understand the circumstances.
“Of course, watching him is a little bittersweet. But I’m very proud of him. I think everybody screws up when they’re young, and to be able to come back around, on that grand of a scale, and make something of your life, it’s commendable.”
‘A light at the end of the tunnel’
Bellatti still remembers the pride he felt when he first drove that red Ford Mustang. It was not just something he wanted, but something he earned. After the Rays selected him in the 12th round of the 2009 MLB draft, he used some of his $100,000 signing bonus to buy the car. It was pristine.
Until Jan. 22, 2010, when it turned into a piece of scrap metal. Bellatti was in disbelief. How could something that once brought him so much joy suddenly cause so much pain?
He would never receive an answer to that question, or any of his other questions, but he had plenty of time to think about them while sitting in county jail. Because the jail was overcrowded, he spent his first month in a maximum security cell. He shared his 6x8-foot room with two other men, all of them in locked inside for 23 hours a day.
That was his lowest point. Bellatti wondered if his life was over, let alone his baseball career. For a while, he had a recurring nightmare. He’d see himself flying down that hill by Steele Canyon High School, just seconds before he made impact with David’s Dodge Caravan. And then he’d wake up.
He eventually realized that there was no sense to be made of a senselessly cruel situation. So he ripped off a piece of paper, grabbed a pencil, and wrote Lynette a letter. He never received one back, but heard about his reduced sentence from his agent, Jonathan Weisz. Her forgiveness allowed him to forgive himself.
“It meant everything to me,” Bellatti said. “She had all the right in the world to be angry or wish me harm or anything you can think of. But her gesture made me feel like everything was going be OK. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Bellatti spent the next two months in a low-security cell. Instead of having to stay in his room for 23 hours a day, he was allowed to work various jobs. At first he was a barber, then he joined the laundry service, and then the janitorial staff. He exercised at the gym in his spare time.
The Rays assured Weisz that there would be a spot waiting for Bellatti upon his release, and they made good on their promise. Bellatti was released early, in 2011, because of good behavior. By June, he was pitching for the Rays’ low-A affiliate in the New York-Penn League. By August, he had a full season in the books, allowing just 21 earned runs in 72 innings.
A long road to the Phillies
Bellatti steadily climbed through the Rays’ minor league system from there, making his big league debut in 2015. It was a short stint. After just 23 1/3 innings, he was diagnosed with right shoulder tendinitis and was sent on a rehab assignment. Despite his injury setback, he pitched well overall, and expected to make the Rays’ opening-day roster in 2016.
It did not pan out that way. Bellatti suffered another shoulder injury early in the minor league season, and was designated for assignment in June. He got calls from almost every team, and negotiated a deal with the Dodgers but failed to pass his physical. The Dodgers had concerns about his elbow, but according to Weisz, Bellatti had never felt elbow pain before. That deal fell through, so Bellatti signed a minor league contract with the Orioles in 2017. A few weeks later, he injured the flexor tendon in his pitching arm in spring training.
The injury required a full repair, which cost him the 2017 season. In 2018, Weisz held a tryout for Bellatti at a local college in San Diego. There were about 10 scouts in attendance, holding up radar guns, but when Bellatti threw his first pitch, it clocked in at 85 mph.
Weisz looked up and saw that Bellatti’s eyes were starting to water. He tried to throw a few more pitches but felt his elbow crunch. He walked off the mound without acknowledging any of the scouts.
“My elbow,” he told Weisz.
“OK,” the agent said.
An MRI revealed that his ulnar collateral ligament was as “loose as a rubber band,” in Bellatti’s words. He underwent Tommy John elbow surgery in February but had no job lined up. While he was rehabbing, his wife, Kylee, started working a day shift at Bloomingdale’s and an overnight shift stocking shelves at Victoria’s Secret. She got Andrew a job at Bloomingdale’s, too, where he sold men’s sports gear, women’s shoes, women’s handbags, and men’s suits.
Because Bellatti hadn’t thrown in 2 1/2 years, Weisz suggested he pitch in the independent league after he was done rehabbing. Bellatti was skeptical at first, but he found a sense of freedom in unaffiliated baseball. He wasn’t stressed. He didn’t have to worry about being released. He could just pitch.
After he went through a brief spring training, and one relief outing for the Sugar Land Skeeters, the Yankees signed him to a minor league contract. He spent the 2020 pandemic season refining his craft, and signed with the Marlins in 2021. He had only 3 1/3 innings worth of experience with their big league team but thrived at Triple-A Jacksonville, posting a 1.52 ERA in 29 2/3 innings.
By 2022, he was back in demand. The Phillies weren’t initially on the top of Bellatti’s list, but after talking to pitching coach Caleb Cotham and director of pitching development Brian Kaplan, he was convinced.
“It was the perfect marriage,” Bellatti said. “It wasn’t just their knowledge of me, but their mantra. After I heard that — PHAH — I was like, I have a few more Zoom calls to go, but I know where I want to be.”
The Phillies’ pitching mantra (the heck with all hitters, to say it in a family-friendly way) resonates with Bellatti because it is about fearlessness. His journey hasn’t been direct, but it has provided him a unique perspective, one that makes any obstacle seem paltry in comparison.
“I don’t remember the last time that I was scared to face anybody,” he said. “And I know you don’t need something like this to happen in order to have that mindset. But I think my path has just provided me with this feeling of, ‘I don’t care who’s in the box, I don’t care what team we’re playing.’ I want to play the best team. And that mindset can only help you.”
The power of forgiveness
Lynette Reid and Andrew Bellatti have never met. They’ve never talked directly. They might never meet, or talk, and that is OK. There is no right or wrong way to process trauma, and Jan. 22, 2010, was traumatic for everyone involved. But nevertheless, they do have a connection.
Bellatti throws his change-ups and sliders and four-seam fastballs with gratitude. He knows that if it weren’t for Lynette’s forgiveness, his life could have turned out very differently. She has pushed him to be a better ballplayer and a better man, and 12 years later, he has become one.
Lynette knows that. And when she sees him up on that mound, striking out the side, making batters look foolish, she believes he’s honoring her late husband.
“I just sit back and let him do his thing,” she said. “It’s wonderful to watch. He’s just doing his job. They put him in to get three batters out and he does it. He’s just a grown-up doing his job, and I want him to know how proud I am.”
