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Astros visited Donald Trump at the White House, but Carlos Correa didn’t join them

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The Houston Astros visited President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday to celebrate last year’s World Series victory. All-star shortstop Carlos Correa was not with them, the Houston Chronicle’s Matt Young reports.

A team spokesperson told Jon Heyman that Correa “and other” Astros had a “family obligation.”

Now-retired outfielder-designated hitter Carlos Beltran didn’t join his former teammates, as well. Last month, he told reporters at an event in New York that he would be skipping the White House visit not because of anything Trump did or said but because he was disappointed in the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Maria, which ravaged Beltran’s home territory of Puerto Rico last year.

“No, I’m not gonna go. Honestly, I’m not going. I’m going to stay with my family,” Beltran said. “I’m going to be here in New York City.”

Trump is “the President of the United States. If sometimes we don’t like the things that he does, or we like the things that he does, at the end of the day he’s the president, so [it] have nothing to do with that,” Beltran continued. “Honestly, I’m not into politics. I’m more into the baseball side of it, sports side of it. That’s something that I don’t have a lot of opinion on that.

“I mean, I’m retired. I feel like I don’t belong to any team. I just feel like I belong to the only team – and that’s my family. That’s the team that I belong [to] right now. I wish those [Astros players] the best over there. I hope they have a great time, enjoy their day, with what it comes to visit the White House.”

Correa also hails from Puerto Rico.

The Astros announced in January that they had accepted Trump’s invitation to visit the White House. A number of other championship-winning teams have stayed away, most notably the Golden State Warriors, who decided to spend their recent time in Washington visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture with group of kids after Trump disinvited them from a White House visit in September. Others, like Clemson’s 2016-17 national-champion football team and the Stanley Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins, accepted Trump’s invitation.

The New England Patriots visited the White House after their 2017 Super Bowl triumph, but more than two dozen team members declined to make the trip, with several citing political reasons.

“This is a tradition and an honor. For many people, this might be their only time to ever be invited to the White House,” Astros president of business operations Reid Ryan said at the time. “And as the representatives of baseball and the World Series champs, when the White House calls and invites you to come up, it’s something that as an organization we felt both a responsibility and an obligation to be part of.”