The website Baseball Reference carries information of every baseball player to play on American shores that it can. This includes every draft pick in league history, going back the full 60 years to the first MLB Draft all the way back in 1965.
So thorough is the database that any anomalies within it immediately stand out. It is therefore of note that in their page for the 2009 MLB Draft, one name has been removed.
With the 1,200th pick of that draft, made in the 40th round, Baseball Reference lists the Tigers as selecting someone referred to only as “B__ B______”. This anonymization is further confirmed on the player page for the person in question, where, again, they are known only as B__ B______. So comprehensive is the removal of any identifying information about this player that they are also listed at being 8’4″ in height (presumably an automatic database response at having no actual height information recorded).
Other websites, however, have not blanked out the name, and can be used to fill in the gap. Indeed, Baseball Reference’s own URL format betrays them, for the name still (mostly) shows up there. The 1,200th pick in the 2009 MLB Draft was a catcher out of Neshannock High School, Pennsylvania, named Benjamin (or Ben) Bechtol. And in 2023, a man named Benjamin Bechtol was reportedly arrested for threatening to blow up the very same school that the Tigers draftee once attended.
Bechtol Facing Serious Charges
Per CBS News, a man of the same name and age as the Tigers’ draftee was arrested and charged with making bomb threats at Neshannock high school back in early 2023.
A man is facing charges after a bomb threat at Neshannock High School earlier this week.Â
Benjamin Bechtol, 32, was charged with weapons of mass destruction and terroristic threats.Â
Neshannock police said they were called to investigate a report of a bomb threat at the high school on Wednesday. Multiple K-9 bomb units cleared the school, and the district learned virtually the next day.Â
Police said they learned Bechtol had called the threat into Lawrence County 911 and was last known to be somewhere in California.Â
Students returned to a regular in-person schedule on Friday, and the district said all buildings were safe and there wasn’t a credible threat.Â
A felony warrant is out for Bechtol’s arrest.Â
Court records available online and viewed by Heavy show that the arrested Bechtol has the same birthdate as the former Tigers draftee.
A follow-up story dated September 2024 from Youngstown, Ohio TV station WFMJ reports that Bechtol’s case had been bound over to a high court, and added details of other offenses he had been accused of.
The case of a New Castle man accused of making several terroristic threats across several Pennsylvania counties has been bound over to a higher court.
According to court records, 34-year-old Benjamin Bechtol is set for a formal arraignment hearing on November 5 at 9:30 a.m.
Bechtol is facing 57 charges of making terroristic threats stemming from several months worth of alleged threats to police officers, hospital phone operators, security officers and more.
Sharon Regional Medical Center was placed on lockdown in February of 2023 after police say Bechtol called in and threatened to shoot up a nurse’s station with an M-16.
Additionally, police say between September of 2022 and March of 2023, Bechtol made several calls to UPMC Jameson in Lawrence County making bomb threats or threats to kill people, even allegedly waving a knife at a security guard at one point.
Other alleged threats came from calls to the Lawrence County 911 center and Slippery Rock University in Butler County.
The person in the mugshot that accompanies the WFMJ article stands 5’10 tall. Despite what Baseball Reference’s page for him may currently claim, Slippery Rock’s Ben Bechtol – whose listed birthdate of September 22, 1990 also matches up perfectly with the age listed in both reports, as well as the aforementioned online court records – also stood 5’10.
The attached mugshot also accords with pictures on social media profiles for a Ben Bechtol whose only connections appear to be with other members of the 2009 Neshannock high school graduating class, and whose pictures also match up with the few available pictures of Neshannock high school’s Benjamin Bechtol’s baseball career.
On February 3, 2023, a week after the CBS News report, an X account named @BechtolBen went on a posting spree. In the spree – in which he posts video showing himself to clearly be the same Ben Bechtol that played baseball, and refers to being fresh out of jail – the user included multiple posts about killing police officers and people being “programmed”.
Bechtol’s Brief Baseball Career And Tigers Stint
As above, Benjamin Bechtol was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the 40th round of the 2009 MLB Draft, selected 1,200th overall out of Neshannock High School in New Castle. He did not however sign with the Tigers, and instead went to college, first attending Jefferson State Community College in Alabama for the 2010 season and transferring to NCAA Division II Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, where he played in 2012.
In his only season of available statistics – his final collegiate season with Slippery Rock – Bechtol posted only a .279/.383/.318 stat line across 156 plate appearances. He does not appear to have ever advanced to professional minor league baseball beyond his draft selection, and certainly did not appear in any MLB games.
Slippery Rock no longer list Benjamin Bechtol on their 2012 roster page. The link that used to link to his profile page now returns a 404 error.
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