Nearly five years later, the leader of the Astros sign stealing movement has finally spoken out about it. Carlos Beltran spoke with the YES Network (who he is working for this season) about the infamous "scandal". Here are some of the highlights of what he had to say.
“We all did what we did,” Beltrán said on CenterStage with Michael Kay, per a YES Network transcript of the program, which airs Monday. “Looking back today, we were wrong.”
Beltrán pointed the finger at his bosses in Houston, suggesting the players would have listened to a demand to stop the scheme. At the same time, Beltrán suggested it would have been impractical for the players to stop themselves from cheating when they believed the scheme was working.
“A lot of people always ask me why you didn’t stop it,” Beltrán said. “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.”
“Well, if they (the Astros front office) got the letter, they knew, but they never shared it with us,” Beltrán said. “Nobody said anything to us, you know, nobody said anything. I wish somebody would’ve said something.”
“We felt that when teams are coming to our ballpark (Minute Maid Park), we felt that some teams have something going on,” Beltrán said. “So we felt that we needed to create our own (system), you know, and that’s what happened.”
“Almost every team, has their video room next to the dugout,” he continued. “Our video room in Houston was in the clubhouse. So we needed to run there to see our at-bats…
“So we felt why we don’t have our video room next to our dugout? Now, all of sudden we got our video room next to our dugout and it’s easy…simple. We had a feed that was good for us, you know?
“We’re seeing the game…you get to see the pitchers, you get to see the catchers. And then we felt that we could use that, you know, but we didn’t feel that we were really crossing the line there. We didn’t feel we were really crossing the line.”
Read the rest of what he said by clicking the link in the tweet below.