Carlos Beltran has broken his silence on the 2017 sign-stealing scandal that rocked baseball.

It was one of the biggest storms to hit the sport with the Houston Astros, in case you forgot, found guilty of electronically stealing signs on their way to winning the World Series in 2017.

From using trash cans to signal pitches to batters in real time to having video screens in the tunnel area that were connected to a center field camera, the Astros designed a new way to cheat that was both elaborate and shocking.

Of course, the Mets were unwillingly dragged into the scandal with Beltran hired as the franchise’s new manager in November 2019, only to be fired two months later after his role in Houston’s wrongdoing was unearthed by The Athletic.

Since then, Beltran has largely been mired in obscurity, not seen or heard from inside the baseball world, until this weekend.

Announced as an analyst for the YES Network for the 2022 season, Beltran appeared as a guest on CenterStage – hosted by Yankees play-by-play broadcaster, Michael Kay – where he gave his first comments on the saga that ripped through baseball.

There were plenty of interesting nuggets to take from the clips released by the YES Network on its social channels over the weekend, with Beltran going into intricate detail to explain exactly what happened from the perspective of the Astros.

“We felt that when teams were coming to our ballpark, we felt that some teams have something going on,” Beltran said, per a transcript from the YES Network.

“So we felt that we needed to create our own (system), and that’s what happened. We created our own and continued to escalate it to where it ended up.

“Well, think about this, every team in baseball have their video room next to the dugout. Our video room in Houston was in the clubhouse, so we needed to run there to see our at-bats, come down and a lot of times you needed to wait. So, we felt why not have our own video room next to our dugout, now all of a sudden we have our own video room next to our dugout and it is easy, simple.

“We had a feed that was good for us. We are seeing the game, you get to see the pitchers, you get to see the catchers and we felt that we could use that.

“We didn’t feel we were really crossing the line there.

“At the end of the day, we felt in our hearts that we were being efficient and smarter than any team out there, that’s how we felt.”

One of the widely reported aspects of The Athletic’s earth-shattering story was the fact that MLB reportedly sent out a directive to all teams in Fall 2017, making it clear that all electric and illegal sign stealing had to stop.

But, according to Beltran in one of the more juicy extracts from the interview, the coaches and the players were never given that message from ownership or the front office.

“Well, if they got the letter they knew, but they never shared it with us,” Beltran said. “Nobody said anything to us. I wished somebody said something and a lot of people ask me why I 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 are you going to stop something that’s working for you? If the organization said something to us, we would have stopped it for sure.”

Once the whistle was blown and the Astros’ bad deeds were exposed, they immediately became the villains of sport, not just baseball, and that was only flamed by certain Houston players refusing to admit what they did was wrong.

Well, it has taken a while, but that admittance of guilt has finally arrived thanks to Beltran, who told Kay that what the Astros did was fundamentally wrong and, as a result, their World Series win in 2017 is tainted.

“Looking back now, yes we did cross the line,” Beltran said. “I made my statement about what happened in 2017 and I apologized and it was the right thing to do when we did it as a team.

“There was a lot of reports, a lot of comments, a lot of stories about it, but this happened in such an organic way for ourselves. We all did what we did and, looking back today, we were wrong and I wish I would have asked more questions about what we were doing.

“I wish the organization said to us ‘what you are doing, we need to stop this,’ but nobody really said anything because we were winning. Some days our system really worked, somedays it didn’t really work, but we had such a good team.

“When you look at our team, some of those guys were All-Stars so, at the end of the day, what we did was wrong but we also had a good team.”

Now, finally, and this should interest Mets fans the most, Beltran didn’t hold back on how he felt he was singled out once punishment was dished out by MLB.

Again, for those who need reminding, as part of the deal for the Commissioner’s Office to get to the bottom of what really happened, the players were given full immunity.

As a result, no players involved were punished with MLB instead going after then manager AJ Hinch, Astros President Jeff Luhnow and Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who was a bench coach with Houston in 2017.

Luhnow was removed from his position while Hinch and Cora were banned from the sport for a year, although both are now back in baseball.

However, for Beltran, who was a player in 2017, he too found himself expelled from the sport he loved and was denied the opportunity to manage the Mets, with this answer to Kay giving some insight into how he felt about the investigation carried out by MLB.

“The part that bothers me about that is when I sat down to cooperate with them, they said to me ‘we’re not going against the players, we’re going after field personnel, front office and the organization,’ so the fact that I’m the only player named in that report, how did it happen?” Beltran said.

“That’s the part I don’t understand – everyone gets immunity except Carlos Beltran? I don’t get it.”

That last part is certainly intriguing because, at the time, there were some who felt Beltran was hard done by because, again, he was a player in 2017 and he was the only player who was chased after and then punished by MLB, so it was fascinating to get Beltran’s views on that.

It will certainly be worth watching the interview in full because no one that was involved in the 2017 sign-stealing scandal has spoken at length about it until now.