‘WE WON THIS TOGETHER’
PARADE OF DREAMS: Thousands jam the streets to celebrate with Astros
Michael Lehane drove around darkened downtown streets Friday morning, searching for a spot. It was 3 a.m., a solid 11 hours before the World Series champion Astros were scheduled to parade through Houston, and although baseball fever had swept the city for days, he was the only one scouting for a spot at that ungodly hour.
Soon, though, there would be others — hundreds of thousands of them in neon orange, crammed along downtown streets, hanging from trees, leaning out of parking garages as confetti rained down from above.
In all, officials estimate up to a million people attended. That does not include thousands more who tried but couldn’t get aboard the city’s overwhelmed light rail system.
They came from Sugar Land, Conroe and the Heights to celebrate the first World Series crown in the city’s history, a truly Houston crowd of immigrants and native Texans, nearly all of them in orange, gray pinstripes or vintage Astros rainbows.
They wore jerseys honoring legendary players — Bagwell, Biggio, Ryan, Cruz — who had given the city much to cheer for over the years but who had always fallen short of the ultimate prize. Other fans wore the names of current players, the guys who had lifted their spirits after Hurricane Harvey and, in a thrilling 5-1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 7 on Wednesday night, gave them reason to jump out of their seats and pop champagne corks and set off fireworks: Altuve, Springer, Correa, Verlander.
Around 2 p.m., people who had arrived hours earlier began screaming as, finally, a lone police officer turned the corner onto Smith Street, leading the start of the championship procession.
George Springer, named World Series MVP after hitting a record-tying five home runs in the Series, stood at the front of the first firetruck. He waved his arms up and down, exhorting the crowd to scream louder, a smile stretched across his face.
Jose Altuve, the star second baseman and likely American League MVP, rode by on a different truck, calmly taking in the sight with his World Series hat cocked to the side atop his head. Several players — including pitcher Dallas Keuchel — recorded the spectacle on their smartphones, clearly in awe of the moment.
After the parade had passed, throngs of onlookers stepped into the street, following the last car all the way to City Hall, where a stage had been set up.
Just before 4 p.m., as fans pressed in toward the platform, Queen’s “We Are the Champions” blared from speakers scattered across downtown. Mayor Sylvester Turner grabbed a microphone and thanked the players, coaches and owner, Jim Crane, for lifting the city’s spirits in the wake of Harvey.
“When the city needed someone to elevate us to another level, the Houston Astros stepped in,” Turner said. “Boston didn’t stop them, the New York Yankees didn’t stop, L.A. didn’t stop them, and now, here we are today.”
Keuchel, the former Cy Young Award winner who started Games 1 and 5, snapped a photo of the crowd to send to fellow ace pitcher Justin Verlander, who missed the parade so he could fly to Italy and marry his supermodel fiancée, Kate Upton. Then he took the mic.
“We weren’t playing for you guys,” Keuchel said to cheers. “We were all playing together. We won this together.”
Josh Reddick, the flamboyant outfielder who celebrated each of the Astros’ series-clinching playoffs win by dancing around the clubhouse wearing nothing but a red, white and blue Speedo, stepped forward.
“Houston,” Reddick yelled, “we don’t have a problem! We have a championship!”
‘Such a big deal’
The crowd, many of whom still were regaining their voices after Wednesday night, screamed its appreciation.
Many had come hours ahead of time because they long had worried they never would see a championship — and because they knew there was no guarantee they’d live to see another.
“This is such a big deal,” Lehane said, explaining his decision to set up a tent and chairs for friends and family more than four hours before sunrise. “It’s already been 56 years; who knows when it will happen again.”
By the time first light cracked over the horizon Friday, thousands already were lined up along the parade route — a 16-block loop starting and ending at City Hall — turning downtown into a massive street party. The smell of burning charcoal and sizzling meat hung in the air, as still thousands more from across the region wedged their way on to light rail trains and Metro buses and congested highways to celebrate the city’s firstever World Series championship.
Hilmer and Roslyn Potcinske had an easier time. They drove from Jersey Village to the Northline Transit Center, nabbed a seat on a southbound train and spent the 30-minute ride downtown reminiscing. The couple, both in their late 70s, first saw a Houston pro baseball game in 1962, the franchise’s first year, back when the team was known as the Colt .45s.
The team didn’t win many games back then, Hilmer Potcinske acknowledged, but the airconditioned Astrodome was reason enough to attend.
“It was hotter than Hades out there in the summer,” he said.
Like many who came out to celebrate, Astros baseball was a constant in their lives in the decades that followed, but their beloved ballclub always seemed to come up short, even after it moved to its swanky new downtown stadium, now named Minute Maid Park, in 2000. The Astros made it to their first World Series five years later, an exciting run fueled by a pair of Hallof-Famers in the twilight of their careers, but the team got swept by the Chicago White Sox.
After that came the rebuilding years — a decade of losing baseball — which made it that much sweeter last Sunday night, when Roslyn Potcinske attended Game 5 of this year’s World Series in Houston with her daughter and son-in-law. She didn’t mind arriving home after 2:30 a.m. following the Astros’ 13-12 extra-innings win that night. The idea of skipping the Astros’ first title parade never occurred to them.
“Oh, you just want to be a part of it,” she said.
As did, apparently, hundreds of Houston ISD employees. Nearly 1,000 of them had requested the day off before district officials made the decision Thursday to close every school for the parade, freeing up the district’s 215,000 students to attend the celebration with their families while forcing many parents to arrange child care on short notice.
‘We’re committed now’
Chrystal Smaw and her husband, Chris, didn’t hesitate to pull their kids out of Cypress-Fairbanks ISD for the day, even after the district opted not to close for the celebration. Evidently, her three children — Josiah, 12, Elijah, 10, and Amaria, 6 — weren’t the only ones cutting class.
“We got a nasty text from their football coach saying ‘Because so many of you chose to skip school, we’ve had to cancel practice,’” Chrystal said. “I was like, come on, you’re a coach, you know what this means to everyone.”
The family moved to Houston from Alaska only two years ago and never really had a home team — until now.
“We’re committed now. We’re Texans; we’re Houstonians,” Chris said. “Regardless of how they play next year, we’ll still be fans.”
Houston police officers and their counterparts from other agencies watched over the crowd, many in bulletproof vests and holding high-powered rifles. Hosting a parade of this scale three days after a truck attack in New York City killed eight people and injured 11 others had some fans on edge — but the threat of terrorism didn’t stop them from coming.
Police Chief Art Acevedo, who had been a vocal Astros supporter throughout the playoff run, said he was doing his best to enjoy the celebration, but acknowledged, “My job is to worry.”
In the packed crowd at Tranquility Park next to City Hall, people crawled onto any elevated surface they could find — manmade knolls, water fountains, landscaping — and fanned themselves with Houston Strong placards.
A high school marching band passed by. Then a series of classic cars, painted in Astros orange. Then a wagon carrying sports talk radio hosts. Then Gov. Greg Abbott in a convertible, followed by several other politicians and dignitaries, hoping to affix their image to the excitement.
“I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere,” said Abbott, shouting into a reporter’s microphone as he waved to the cheering crowd. “It’s incredible the way this team has united this city, this region and this state.”
Many fans watched from high up in buildings and from enclosed walkways over city streets.
Finally, they appeared: Several Astros players perched atop a firetruck, showered in confetti and flanked by law enforcement on foot and on horseback. Other players followed, hanging out of the windows of a pair of double-decker buses. Onlookers jumped up and down and waved rally flags. Alex Bregman held the championship trophy above his head.
As they passed, the crowd’s cheers turned into a singular roar. “We love you!” a woman shouted from a parking deck. “Go Stros!” another called, while waving a Houston Chronicle newspaper emblazoned with the oneword headline: “Champs!”
A day to remember
Afterward, some headed to the nearest bar to keep the celebration going. Others played in the confetti for a few minutes before trying to figure out how to get home in the midst of the massive crowd.
As the sun began to set and the streets emptied, Antionette Ketchum and Chase Sloan still sat in their camping chairs on the lawn at City Hall, taking it all in.
They had left their home in Fresno at 11 a.m. but missed the parade itself, stuck waiting on the train to get downtown. Nearly seven hours later, it didn’t seem to matter. They’d chanted and cheered once they got on the train and then staked out a spot on the lawn in time to catch the festivities.
Now, with their packed lunches eaten and phone batteries dead, they had found a moment of calm. Nearby, a man played catch with two kids. They felt the significance of the day.
“We were there,” Ketchum said. “To be able to say that is priceless.”