Former MLB star turned baseball analyst Carlos Beltran has opened up about the Houston Astros' sign-stealing scandal in his first extensive comments on the topic.
Beltran, recently hired as an analyst by the YES Network, confirmed in an interview with YES' Michael Kay and set to be aired on Monday that the Astros' championship is now tainted by the scandal.
"Is there a stain on the Astros' 2017 World Series championship?" Kay asked on a new episode of the network's "CenterStage," according to a transcript released ahead of the interview's airing.
"Yeah, there is," Beltran said, "because, you know, what we did, and we all have taken responsibility, and at some point we all have shown remorse about what we did."
The findings of an MLB investigation into the cheating were released following the 2019 season, and cost several figures who were involved their jobs, including Beltran, who was fired as New York Mets manager just weeks after being hired.
In the new interview, Beltran says the Astros failed to properly relay and enforce a league memo from September 2017 in which Commissioner Rob Manfred warned teams against using cameras and other technologies to gain an unfair advantage.
"Well, if they got the letter, they knew, but they never shared it with us," Beltran said. "Nobody said anything to us, you know, nobody said anything. I wish somebody would've said something. A lot of people always ask me why you didn't stop it. And my answer is, I didn't stop it the same way no one stopped it. This is working for us. Why you gonna stop something that is working for you? So if the organization would've said something to us, we would've stopped it for sure."
As part of the scheme, the Astros allegedly had a TV near their dugout with live footage from a camera in center field. They would then bang on a garbage can to signal to their batters which pitch to expect.
In addition to Beltran's dismissal by the Mets, the Astros fired manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, and the Red Sox dismissed manager Alex Cora for one season before he was later re-hired.
Beltran indicated to Kay that the Astros' sign-stealing system was designed because they suspected opponents had similar such arrangements.
“We felt that when teams are coming to our ballpark, we felt that some teams have something going on,” Beltran said. “So we felt that we needed to create our own, you know, and that’s what happened.”
Beltran, who was not suspended but lost his job with the Mets over the episode, said he was upset over being the only player named in the league report despite his full cooperation and assurances from investigators that they were only targeting team employees.
“That’s the part that I don’t understand," he said. "Everyone gets immunity except Carlos Beltran? I don’t get it.”
The nine-time All-Star retired after the fateful 2017 season, which marked his only World Series title as a player.
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