The manager of a Mexican League baseball team, Francisco “Paquin” Estrada, was reported missing Thursday morning, and then found hours later.


At a news conference broadcast on Facebook, authorities and team officials divulged few details about the incident, but they said that the Bravos de Leon manager had been the victim of an extortion attempt. When reporters pressed team officials on the specifics of the extortion, they said Estrada had not been kidnapped.


Then Estrada gave a brief account of what happened, and here’s where it gets really sketchy. From the Associated Press:

The manager said he was coerced into staying in a hotel room for three nights. He said he was not kept there by armed abductors, but rather by an unknown person on the other end of the telephone who would not allow him to sleep and constantly quizzed him about what was on television to make sure he was still there.

After the press conference the team tweeted that he had been the victim of attempted telephone extortion.


The AP wrote that Estrada “could have been the victim of what Mexicans call ‘virtual kidnapping,’ in which criminals threaten to harm a relative or pretend to have abducted a family member while demanding cash.”

On Thursday, the league said the last contact with Estrada had been Tuesday night, and that he missed a news conference on Wednesday. The team had said it didn’t know whether the manager may have suffered a medical emergency or been the victim of a crime.


A few hours later, the Attorney General of the state of Guanajuato tweeted that Estrada was found unharmed.