A STAND-UP STANDOUT
ASTROS STAR SHORTSTOP CARLOS CORREA ALSO PUERTO RICO'S GO-TO GUY
They professed panic and love before the storm left everyone in the dark.
While he carried the weight of his adoptive city recovering a month after Hurricane Harvey last September, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa and his family in Houston watched Hurricane Maria demolish their native Puerto Rico.
They saw reports of 155 mph winds, surging floods and whipping debris cutting off water and electricity. They were running out of chances to communicate with relatives on the island. A humanitarian crisis loomed.
Correa's grandparents provided hourly disaster updates. They were too infirm to evacuate. Alzheimer's disease rendered his maternal grandfather bedridden in a two-story concrete home. A terrifying howl outside persisted. A neighbor's roof flew off. A nearby river rose.
Correa and his two younger siblings made sure one more time to say to their grandparents, "I love you."
Cellphone service in Puerto Rico went dead soon after.
This was two weeks before the Astros began an emphatic postseason run. They would win the first World Series in franchise history, uplift Houston from its hurricane trauma and become favorites to repeat in 2018. They would commemorate the championship with a March 12 visit to the White House, which Correa skipped to draw attention to the aid and anguish of a U.S. territory he thought the federal government had neglected.
Unthinkable destruction
Hurricane Maria destroyed 87,094 homes and damaged 385,703, according to Puerto Rico's governor. Undrinkable water and a ruined electrical grid perpetuated the crisis for months. Aid stagnated at ports. A mass exodus left the rest on the island to toil in darkness. The suicide rate tripled.
Thinking about home used to be a reliable escape for Correa, an All-Star in his fourth season with the Astros.
“After the hurricane, it was devastating,” he said.
The country's worst natural disaster in nearly a century left 3.4 million people trapped and powerless. Their families abroad felt the same way.
“It's tough for me to cry,” Correa, 23, said. “I was hurting on the inside.”
He usually keeps his phone on vibrate. He turned on the ringer to its loudest volume in the wake of Maria, hoping to hear from his grandparents.
“I didn't even know if they were alive or not,” Correa said.
The Correas lost count of how many days passed without the ability to communicate with relatives. Desperation connected them from 2,000 miles apart.
“I felt that I was going to die just hearing about the people talk about the place where my mom lived,” said Sandy, Correa's mom. “It completely was wiped out by water.”
Maria was the 10th-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record, according to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Sandy imagined the humidity and mosquitoes swarming a wasteland left behind in Santa Isabel, the family's hometown on the southern coast.
Correa had moved his parents — Sandy and Carlos — and siblings — JC and Leibysand — out of a barrio and into his large house in Texas two years ago. Air conditioning, plumbing and refrigeration suddenly did not feel like comforts.
Lorna Rodriguez, a family friend, who translated for Sandy, tried consoling the Correas during sleepless nights.
“Lorna,” Sandy said, “could you take a shower and enjoy it when you know our parents don't have water? Can you eat and feel OK when you know they must be hungry? I go to bed, and I feel the air conditioning, and it makes me feel guilty.”
Correa compartmentalized his focus at the end of the regular season. He finished with his best eight-game stretch, batting .548, with three home runs and 13 RBIs.
He owes part of his career to his maternal grandmother. She had saved up money to help Correa afford entrance fees for scouting events.
At some point after the hurricane — eight days, maybe 10, maybe 12; it blurred together for Correa — a phone call roused him at 3 a.m.
“Daniella!” Correa shouted to his sleeping fiancée, Daniella Rodriguez. “My grandma's calling! My grandma's calling!”
His maternal grandparents had endured havoc. (He later found out his paternal grandparents were less scathed.) A river had flooded their home, forcing Correa's uncle to carry his bedridden grandfather upstairs, where several family members had huddled. The wind had flung trees against the house with hammering jolts and torn off the roof. Correa's relatives had been living without essentials in mud that caked the first floor. Word had spread that people were catching cell reception on a nearby mountain. His grandmother pleaded for help.
Crane helps relief efforts
“Javi,” she said, using Correa's middle name, Javier, “I need water. I'm really thirsty, and I'm hungry.”
She sobbed and heaved into the phone: “We've got nothing here.”
Correa knew to contact Astros owner Jim Crane, who had made his fortune in shipping logistics and could offer cargo planes and some of his corporate sponsors — H-E-B, Academy and Adidas — that could fill pallets and bags with food, generators, toiletries and water.
“Over 100,000 pounds of supplies,” Correa said. “Enough for the whole hometown.”
He contributed to a wave of charitable efforts. Carlos Beltran quickly pledged $1 million. Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez kick-started a campaign that raised more than $30 million.
“But the supplies,” Correa said, “they were going nowhere.”
Few available truck drivers, fuel shortages and government stagnation kept thousands of shipping containers and tons of goods stuck north, at the Port of San Juan.
Correa, a prodigy and the pride of Santa Isabel, galvanized a network of local volunteers, many from the National Association of Christian Churches, to retrieve and deliver the donations. The impulse for self-reliance resembled the spirit in Houston after Harvey.
“It's government issues in Puerto Rico. You know how it goes,” Correa said. “I had to try to figure out a way that it would get to those in need. Millions of dollars and the millions of supplies that people were sending, nothing was getting to the south.”
Correa arranged a police escort after seeing reports of stealing.
“Everybody's trying to fight for survival,” Correa said.
Correa and his family on the mainland received gratifying feedback. Still, they wanted to see the new Puerto Rico in person. They organized a relief mission and went for Thanksgiving.
Landscape devastated
Little improved in the two months after Maria, but it felt to the Correas like everything about their home country had changed. A verdant tableau of the tropics seen from airplane windows used to greet passengers. The Correas saw tones of yellow and brown, smeared and sludgy, dotted by roofs with blue tarps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“Even the water wasn't the same,” JC said.
There seemed no end to the desperation in Puerto Rico.
Fishing villages lost their channels to the heartland because price gouging for gasoline stranded residents. Barrios tucked into mountain towns subsisted on farming, which was ruined.
“Everything is different now,” JC said. “Santa Isabel, we're known for tomatoes and vegetables, and all that was gone. The hurricane took it all away. They have to start new.”
Correa's parents and siblings arrived first. They sweated through their shirts while loading and distributing supplies. They discovered more were needed.
“We were walking away, and people were begging for milk for kids,” Sandy said.
The elderly at a retirement home pleaded with the Correas to send adult diapers.
Driving from the airport in San Juan, Correa flipped on high beams to navigate enduring devastation. “It was pitch black,” he said. “It was like you were living in a forest,” his brother added.
Encounters with residents
Only 47 percent of the country had power restored. People siphoned gas from cars into generators. Trees and light poles tangled on roads. Billboards and roofs were scattered. Residents stayed inside.
Correa organized charity events and threw a concert to enliven his community, but first he needed to find his grandmother. “I missed you,” she said. Correa delivered a hug he could not pack up and send with the previous cargo.
“She was crying,” he said. “She was very happy to see me.”
The community treated him like a savior.
“Thank you so much,” the people told him, blotting their tears with their shirts. “We had nothing. We had no water. We had no food. We were thirsty.”
Said Correa: “When you hear that, it makes you feel happy that you're trying to help society and trying to make a difference. You don't do it for publicity. You don't do it for people to recognize you. You do it because you want people to have a better life.”
Children gasped when he showed up for a daylong toy giveaway. There were boys and girls between 6 and 9 years old. The Correas had seen several like them clearing debris off streets.
“They don't have anything to do,” JC said.
Correa handed out Star Wars action figures and pink boxes of dolls. He sang and threw his arms up with excitement.
“I was a kid, like them, in Puerto Rico, from a poor community, that got all the way here to the big leagues,” he said.
Hero in his homeland
He became the first Puerto Rican player taken No. 1 in the draft when the Astros selected him in 2012.
Now the community looks to him for more than inspiration. People depend on his resources. Correa said he would donate supplies for another two or three years — not that he or any individual can repair the country in that time.
More than six months after Maria, Correa has started a new Astros season. About 7 percent of Puerto Rico remains without electricity. A power outage in early March affected almost 970,000 people. FEMA recently delivered 94,000 liters of water and 50,000 meals. The health department's Commission for Suicide Prevention reported skyrocketing rates of attempted suicides.
Of the $23 billion approved for disaster aid, Puerto Rico has received only $1.27 billion for food and $430 million for infrastructure. The island's debt crisis forecasts a bleak future.
Correa knows the figures. He recited some like an activist on the day after his teammates flew to the White House. He understands the power of his platform. It is greater than the persuasion he has over his grandmother. No matter how much she wanted his help, she has refused his offers to move her to the U.S., Correa said to MLB.com.
“I've got more grandsons I've got to take care of,” she told him.
Puerto Rico has gotten used to the self-reliance that emerges from disaster. In forlorn parts of the island, families need assistance but are not waiting. Some young girls near Santa Isabel have a distraction, a source of light in the darkness. They are playing with dolls they got from a ballplayer.