LOS ANGELES — It’s not a story of grand redemption or the unlikely tale of an unexpected hero on baseball’s biggest stage. Carlos Beltran’s World Series contributions went uncaptured by cameras and unknown to the box scores, and the first championship of his 19-season career stands hardly as its signature moment so much as its culmination.

While his teammates sprayed beer and champagne around a cramped visitors clubhouse at Dodger Stadium following their 5-1 Game 7 win, Beltran, who saw only three at-bats in the series and did not record a hit, suggested he will consider retirement.

“My decision is going to be difficult — playing one more year, or deciding to stay home,” he told For The Win. “But staying home won’t mean staying at home. Staying home would still mean being able to be around the game of baseball. I love the game of baseball, and I have learned, this year, so much about working with the guys.

“I want to be around. I don’t want to disappear.”

Throughout the postseason, Astros manager A.J. Hinch and various Houston players praised Beltran for his leadership in the clubhouse. World Series MVP George Springer, who opened the set by going 0-for-4 with four strikeouts in Game 1, credited a conversation with Beltran for helping turn his series around. According to The Athletic, it was Beltran that helped broker some form of understanding between Yuli Gurriel and Yu Darvish — with whom Beltran played in Texas in 2016 — after Gurriel’s racist incident in Game 3. And on the FOX postgame show following Game 7, Beltran strongly hinted that he showed younger Astros players the way Darvish tipped his pitches.

Exhibit A why some non-jocks are needed in booth: Beltran was ready to explain Yu Darvish tipping pitches. @arod @davidortiz talked him out pic.twitter.com/mtbxdRRpj3 — Jeff Pearlman (@jeffpearlman) November 2, 2017

“He meant everything to us,” Carlos Correa said. “He brought a different chemistry into our clubhouse, and now we’re World Series champions. He did his part.”

Beltran said the lack of playing time in the series afforded him an opportunity to reflect on his career.

“I haven’t had a lot of action, like in previous playoffs,” he said. “I’ve been in the dugout, been active with the younger players, been able to motivate them and give them information about the game. And it allowed me to go, ‘Man, this is great, that God has given me this opportunity at this point in my career.’ Being able to do it, it’s emotional, and it’s special.”

A natural right-hander who taught himself to switch-hit while already playing in the minor leagues for the Royals, Beltran won the AL Rookie of the Year award in 1999 and played well for some lousy Royals teams in the early 2000s. But he emerged as a star on the national landscape in his first turn with the Astros in 2004, when, among other feats, he posted an astonishing 1.557 OPS over 12 postseason games — tying a record with eight postseason homers in the process — and carried the club to within one win of the World Series.

At his best, Beltran was beautiful to watch, a player of such exquisitely efficient movements as to confound some in the sport: He made things look so easy that critics wondered why he wasn’t trying harder, mistaking his grace for a lack of effort.

He signed a massive free-agent deal with the Mets after his breakout 2004 October and spent most of his seven seasons in New York coupling outstanding on-field production with uncomfortable off-field misunderstandings. He missed a team trip to Walter Reade Army Medical Center to attend a prescheduled meeting for his own charity — the project that would become the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy in Puerto Rico — and caught heat for disrespecting the troops. He clashed with the Mets over medical protocol back when that was still novel. He provided the team MVP-caliber production from 2006-2008, but never quite shook needling, unsubstantiated, and occasionally downright absurd blather from the talk-radio set that insisted he was overpaid, overrated, uninterested and selfish.

It may have been hard for some to see, but Beltran throughout the early and middle part of his career demonstrated the type of baseball IQ and desire to improve that foreshadowed his leadership role in later seasons, and some of his quirks betrayed his curiosity about the game: He negotiated in his free-agent contract for a special pitching machine that fired numbered tennis balls at speeds up to 150 mph. He picked out his game bats from those relegated to batting-practice duty by tapping them against the wall and listening for density. He briefly owned a monkey named Mikaela. It took years, but Beltran slowly won over even his harshest detractors, and earned praise for mentoring younger players like Lucas Duda and Angel Pagan.

Beltran appeared close to the end of his run of excellence — if not his career entirely — as early as 2010, as injuries and surgeries on both knees cost him the footspeed that made him a rangy center fielder and one of the most successful base-stealers of all-time. But after moving to right field in 2011, he stayed healthy and hit well and began, with a deadline deal to San Francisco, a productive tour of big-league stops in his mid-to-late 30s that included two All-Star seasons and two postseason appearances in St. Louis, two and a half years of solid output back in New York with the Yankees, and a strong stretch run for the Rangers last season.

If Beltran’s career, in fact, ended with Wednesday’s Game 7 win, he finishes with 2,725 regular-season hits, 435 homers, nine All-Star nods, three Gold Gloves, and a career WAR that ranks seventh all-time among center fielders — behind six Hall of Famers. He owns a stellar 1.021 career postseason OPS and an 86.4% career stolen-base rate that ranks third all-time.

And over nearly two decades in the Majors, Beltran developed the skills and wisdom that made him more valuable to the Astros’ championship club than his meager 2017 on-field contributions would indicate, as a trusted sounding board for younger players, as a spokesperson and contributor to the club’s hurricane relief efforts in Houston and Puerto Rico, as an advisor, and as a dugout tactician. His stellar career accomplishments required no ring for validation, but the ring he earned nonetheless.