For devoted fans, ‘it’s what city needs’
Debbie Brannan bit her knuckles, terrified, in the stands at Minute Maid Park, looking at Los Angeles on the big screen. One more out.
“I’m nervous!” she shouted. The decibels cranked up. “We believed,” said her friend, Jennifer Reyna.
“It’s what the city needs,” said David Rojas.
They wore jerseys and huge orange hats.
Then, on Reyna’s 48th birthday, the final out of the Astros’ first championship hit Jose Altuve’s glove. The stadium roared. Tears streamed down Brannan’s face. “We did it! We did it” The sweetest birthday. About 17,000 jubilant fans shook Minute Maid. Somehow, only one made it onto the field.
Across the city, fireworks and perhaps gunshots rang out after the last out around 11 p.m. The stadium crowd spilled onto Texas Avenue, with some climbing light poles and lighting victory cigars against chants of, “Let’s go Houston!” In other spots across Houston, fans honked their car horns and shouted.
“It’s like New Year’s out here,” a police officer radioed to a dispatcher.
The World Series win, for one night and maybe longer, stripped away the fatigue and despair wrought by Hurricane Harvey and seemed to mirror the region’s determination to recover. ‘We did it’
Mark Aleman poured beer all over himself and looked to the heavens. He wiped his face. The tears came naturally. “We did it. We did it. We did it.” His mind immediately turned to his father Sidney, who died shortly before his beloved Astros’ first chance at greatness.
Aleman was at that 2005 turn, too. This one was much sweeter.
“If he was here, he’d be doing the same thing,” Aleman said of his father and the beer bath.
Aleman’s older brother, Sidney Cortez, did some of the pouring. So did little brother Nino Cortez.
“We waited,” Aleman said, tearing up again. “He’s watching us. We won.”
The Astros erased a 55-year-old championship drought that has held since their founding, but for exultant Houstonians, they were playing to erase, if even for a moment, a flood. Some players kept pictures of hurricane damage in their lockers so, on bad days, they’d keep their perspective.
It was almost as if, with each swing of their increasingly productive bats through the playoffs, they were blasting away the city’s sodden wreckage. Or at least putting the memory of it out of reach for a few blessed hours at a stretch.
There’d been seasons of loss, three of them with 100 back-toback.
In this team they found an allegory for their scrappy town. They could question years of badweather fate and decisions about where to build, how to build, whether and when to evacuate, did we need this levee or that concrete bayou, but whatever the calculus, they’d always get back up.
They’ll do it again — it’ll just be a little easier Thursday morning.
“This is a team of destiny, with the floods and everything, and I really believed it was going to happen,” said Mike Oesterling, a 24-year-old financial analyst who was hanging on every pitch at Griff ’s sports bar in Montrose. “There has been this feeling among Houston fans that Houston just can’t win. Winning this will do a lot to alleviate that for a lot of people.”
A bum leg aggravated by work digging out her Harvey-flooded house couldn’t keep Kathy Kornhause, 60, from limping into Minute Maid for Game 7.
“Are you kidding?” Kornhause said. “We had season tickets when they lost 100 games. Nothing would keep us out.”
Her roommate Betty Neumann, nursing her right wrist from a flood cleanup fall, agreed.
“We came to all three games (in Houston),” Neumann said. “We’re not missing this.”
Moving as fast as Kornhause’s air cast would let them, they were eager to see this come to an end with the Astros on top.
“To see everything going on, we need a distraction from the rest of it,” Kornhause said. City ‘deserves’ a title
Hope reached a high after the third inning, all the way to section 415, but sitting alone practically at the top of Minute Maid, Tom Barlow didn’t want to jinx it.
“I’ve had my heart broken so many times,” Barlow, 55, said, rattling off Oilers teams that tasted defeat after almost assured victory, and Astros teams that left him surly for almost the entire summer.
A five-run lead could be erased, he said.
“But it’s a big hill to climb,” Barlow said, biting his lip as if he swore.
A wild pitch in the fourth that advanced Marwin Gonzalez to second gave him renewed confidence.
“Boys are hitting them,” he said.
Two outs later with the inning over, Barlow was counting outs.
“Eighteen,” he said. “Eighteen.”
One section over, Lillie Jackson directed traffic, exchanging highfives with exuberant fans.
She has loved baseball ever since high school, and worked as an usher in Minute Maid Park for 11 years.
The smiling, silver-haired 79-year-old from south Houston coached a Little League team there in 1996. They were the White Sox, first. Then, the Indians.
She started coming to watch the Astros soon after — and in 2006, started working here.
“I’m so excited, I can’t bring it out,” she said, clutching her heart.
Across town in the Heights, Christian’s Tailgate sports bar drew Joel Gennel, perhaps one of the city’s most conflicted fans.
He grew up in Los Angeles but has lived in Houston for 12 years, spending the past two months putting his carpentry skills to use by rebuilding flood-damaged homes. And though he’d be foregoing bragging rights, he was pleased with the Astros win.
“Just as happy,” Gennel said. “I think it’s exciting because the city needs something like this.”
At Griff’s, a Houston institution with the smell of stale beer and damp floorboards to prove it, bleary-eyed fans were packed inside and chain-smoking outside throughout the game
Oesterling said he has put his life on hold as he’s watched his hometown team try to win it all.
“I’m stressed, man,” he said. “I’ve been an Astros fan my entire life — since I was 7 years old. I’ve been waiting for this.”
He said Houston deserved a World Series win, for the fans. For the past few weeks, he said, people on the street have stopped him when he’s wearing a jersey to talk about how the season is going.
“You see Houston becoming a baseball town again,” he said. “And this city deserves (a World Series title) so much.”
The chase, he said, has been physically and psychologically taxing. “I haven’t seen my girlfriend much. I’ve never been in a postseason run this long and I never would have imagined it would be this exhausting,” he said. “It’s just been work and Astros. It’s been a ride.” ‘A long time coming’
Back at Minute Maid, even before the final out, Rick Buentello, 38, was confident enough to stand in line with about 200 others at the Astros team store, in the hopes he’d be among the first to grab some World Series-winning gear.
For him, it was the culmination of a lifelong wait for a complete victory.
“We’ve been waiting for this since I was a little boy watching with my grandpa,” he said. “It’s a big deal. A long time coming. Feels good.”
Kornhause, in her air cast, was already looking ahead to next year. The Astros are young, and her house will be a bit less soggy.
“Spring training starts in February,” Neumann said.