Baseball

Carlos Beltran Resigns in Wake of Astros Cheating Scandal


Carlos Beltran, who was implicated in the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal this week, stepped down as the Mets manager on Thursday, less than three months after he was hired, the team announced.

“We met with Carlos last night and again this morning and agreed to mutually part ways,” the team said in a statement.

Beltran’s decision relieved the team of the burden of deciding whether to dismiss or suspend him on their own, even before he held his first practice.

Beltran on Monday was named as a central figure in M.L.B.’s scathing report on the Astros’ cheating scandal, but he was not punished by the league because he had been a player at the time.

But as the Mets deliberated over the past three days, the decisive steps taken by the Astros and Red Sox in dismissing their own managers, both of whom were also named in the report, made it more difficult for Beltran to remain in a position of authority.

The Mets hired Beltran on Nov. 1, giving him his first job as a coach or manager after a standout 20-year career as a player. But less than two weeks later, a report in The Athletic revealed that starting in 2017, when Beltran was an outfielder for the Astros, the team had coordinated a cheating operation to illicitly steal opposing teams’ signs using video feeds and then communicate them to their own batters.

M.L.B. conducted an investigation and determined that the primary figures in designing the operation were Beltran and Alex Cora, who was fired as manager of the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday for his role in the caper while he was a bench coach for the Astros.

M.L.B. also suspended Astros Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow for allowing the scheme to happen under their watch. About an hour later, both men were fired by Jim Crane, Houston’s owner.

Beltran, however, was not suspended, because M.L.B. decided not to punish any of the players. That left a loophole for Beltran: He had committed the infractions on another team and not been punished, so he was technically free to manage.

But it would have appeared awkward for him to do so while Cora and Hinch — who lost his job for doing far less than Beltran did — had both been suspended and fired.

[This is a developing story that will be updated.]



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