Telling the story of Harvey, the Astros and Houston’s resilience
This essay is excerpted from the prologue to “Hurricane Season: The Unforgettable Story of the 2017 Houston Astros and the Resilience of the City” (Hachette Books).
In downtown Houston on a balmy November night, thousands of loud, exuberant baseball fans are surging along Texas Avenue and into the hulking monolith called Minute Maid Park, home of the newly crowned American League champion Houston Astros. Clad in orange jerseys and blue caps and carrying homemade signs scrawled over in Sharpie — “ALTUVE: MVP,” “HOUSTON STRONG” — many are taking a break from long hours replacing drywall or laying hardwood floors or trying to sponge away mold. Just weeks earlier, a brutal hurricane dropped more than 50 inches of torrential rain on greater Houston over a four-day period. The storm, with the quaint name of Harvey, would destroy or damage tens of thousands of homes and upending the lives of countless people in the nation’s fourth-largest city.
Tonight, however, these fans are pouring into Minute Maid Park to a different kind of history being made. They will stay on their feet until the last out. The roar they’re generating inside the closed-roof stadium is as loud as Hurricane Harvey thunder. They’re here, they’re loud, they’re ready — even though the seventh and deciding game of the 2017 World Series is unfolding before their eyes, not in Minute Maid Park but in Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, 1,500 miles away.
In their one and only prior appearance in the World Series, the Astros had been swept by the Chicago White Sox in four games in 2005. Now, for the first time in the 56-year history of the franchise, the Astros are nine innings away from a world championship. If few fans could make the trip to LA to watch their heroes take on the National League champion Dodgers, they can’t get much closer than watching the game on El Grande, the 54-foot-tall, 124-foot-wide high-definition screen in center field. Perhaps they imagine the racket they are making can somehow carry westward on a mighty wind, and Altuve and Correa and Springer and Bregman and all the other Astros they have cheered all season can take heart from Major League Baseball’s loudest fanatics, their noise magnified by a retractable roof Astros players always want closed. The players insist they feed off the noise.
As baseball fans — and maybe even non-baseball fans caught up in the Astros’ splendid story — know by now, the Astros defeated the Dodgers in seven games, the final one played in the storied hollow of Chavez Ravine in front of 54,000 hostile fans. No one left either stadium that night — November 1, 2017 — until José Altuve, the Astros’ mighty-mite
second- baseman — the American League’s Most Valuable Player — fielded a routine ground ball and threw to first base three 3 hours and 37 minutes after “Play Ball.”
For the Astros, the combination of a magnificently played series, a 101-victory regular season, and a crippling natural disaster back home was so incredible it might have given the schmaltziest Hollywood screenwriter pause, but those fans filling Minute Maid saw it. They believed. It happened. And the fourth-largest city in the nation, a city still reeling in the wake of disaster, could smile, could celebrate, could ask bleary-eyed co-workers the next morning, “How ’bout them Astros?!”
“This season, this team and this World Series has left Astros fans addled,” the Houston Chronicle reported the morning after the championship. “From Beaumont to Corpus, Brenham to Fairfield, they awoke Thursday morning and pinched themselves. We won the World Series. The Houston Independent School District closed Friday for a victory parade downtown. With an expected attendance of 750,000, it will likely surpass those that celebrated the end of World War II.”
The Astros’ first-ever World Series victory is a baseball story, to be sure, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the story of a major American city — a city (and a state) that the rest of the nation doesn’t always love or understand — becoming a sentimental favorite because of its grace and good will in response to pain and hardship. Houston has endured its share of storms and hurricanes over the years, but nothing like Hurricane Harvey and the ensuing flood.
It’s the story of a team of likable, refreshingly good-natured guys who each wore a “Houston Strong” patch on their jerseys and meant it. When Houston was down, they picked the city up and carried it. They brought hope during a dark time. .
Sportswriter Richard Justice described the Astros as “a nearly perfect mix of youth and experience, passion and resolve.” Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post was impressed by what he described as “the deep sense of humanity they all seem to possess,” from pitcher Charlie Morton’s “self-discovery” to Carlos Beltráan’s “quiet leadership” to Jose Altuve’s “infectious joy” to George Springer’s “profound grasp of this team’s role in its city’s recovery.”
The Houston Astros were leading their division, the American League West, when the hurricane hit. The ’Stros could have been irrelevant, no matter how well they were playing, but that’s not how it turned out. In the midst of crisis, the team understood — and so did their fans — that the game, the national pastime they played so well, meant something. Like the New Orleans Saints after Hurricane Katrina and the Boston Red Sox after the Boston Marathon bombing, the Astros were playing for their devastated city, and as fate would have it, they won a World Series.