[1] Belle attended Huntington High School in Shreveport, where he was a star baseball and football player, a member of the National Honor Society and vice president of the local Future Business Leaders of America.
[5][6] In his junior year, he was batting .349 before an incident involving a heckler insulting him with racial epithets at an SEC Tournament game led to a suspension that kept him out of the College World Series.
[9] On July 19, Belle hit his first major league home run and went 2-for-4, helping Cleveland to a 10–1 victory over the Minnesota Twins.
[11] Belle became the fourth player to have eight straight seasons of 30 home runs and 100 RBI, joining Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx and Lou Gehrig (a feat since matched by Albert Pujols, Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez).
[12] In 1992, Belle would have become one of only five players in MLB history to hit a home run over the left-field roof of Detroit's Tiger Stadium (joining Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard, Cecil Fielder and Mark McGwire).
[15] The achievement was more impressive because Belle played only 143 games in 1995 due to a season shortened by the previous year's player strike.
He finished second in the voting to the Boston Red Sox' Mo Vaughn even though he led the American League that season in runs scored, home runs, RBI, slugging percentage and total bases, and outpaced Vaughn head-to-head in every important offensive category except RBI (both men had 126); both players' teams reached the playoffs.
[19] Additionally, when Cal Ripken Jr. ended his record consecutive game streak at 2,632 in September 1998, it was Belle who took over as the major leagues' active leader in the category (his streak of 392 consecutive games ended the next year due to a perceived lack of hustle viewed by his manager).
[7] Belle's contract with the White Sox had an unusual clause allowing him to demand that he would remain one of the three highest-paid players in baseball.
He was kept on Baltimore's active 40-man roster for the next three years as a condition of the insurance policy which largely reimbursed the Orioles for the remainder of his contract.
Belle homered in the final at-bat of his major-league career, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards on October 1, 2000.
"[25] Eventually, Belle routinely refused to speak with the media whatsoever, explaining that players like Steve Carlton also did not interview and that he preferred to concentrate on baseball.
[26] Buster Olney wrote about his outbursts as a member of the Cleveland Indians: In 2001, following his retirement, the New York Daily News' columnist Bill Madden wrote: In his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility (2006), he garnered only 7.7% of the baseball writers' votes, missing election by an extremely wide margin.
[30] In retirement, Belle had his first encounter with the Cleveland Indians since leaving the club in 1996, during their 2012 spring training in Goodyear, Arizona and was joined by former teammates Kenny Lofton, Sandy Alomar Jr., and Carlos Baerga.
[36] College (LSU): Major League Baseball (Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, Baltimore Orioles):