Worried Astros
Several members of the Astros have the devastation in Puerto Rico on their minds
On Aug. 31, the Houston Astros returned from a road trip to a city devastated by the impact of Hurricane Harvey, which forced tens of thousands of people out of their homes and caused biblical floods that at one point left about 30% of Houston under water.
Three weeks later, the Puerto Rican members of the team — shortstop Carlos Correa, outfielder-DH Carlos Beltran, catcher Juan Centeno, bench coach Alex Cora and interpreter Alex Cintron — relived the distress vicariously when Hurricane Maria tore through their native island with ferocity not felt in nearly a century, wreaking catastrophic damage.
In many ways the second experience felt worse, because of the anguish created by the inability to reach their loved ones as they saw TV images of the destruction Maria left behind, knocking down cellphone towers and destroying Puerto Rico’s infrastructure.
Correa couldn’t contact his family for six days, Beltran for five or six, Centeno for a week, Cintron for 10 days. Only Cora somehow managed to get through.
“I was literally going crazy,” said Beltran, who started a relief fund by donating $1 million. “I was relieved when I heard from them, but the stories they told me broke my heart. They had no power, no water, no gas. My brother spent nearly 25 hours waiting in line for gas. That destroyed me when I heard my brother say that.”
Seldom has the personnel of a team at this level seen their season disrupted by a natural disaster of these proportions, let alone two of them.
As they play their roles for an Astros team that’s two wins away from reaching the World Series, the five Puerto Ricans keep a close, concerned eye on developments back home, where some 85% of the 3.4 million U.S. citizens who live there still don’t have electricity and about onethird lack running water.
Gov. Ricardo Rossello said he expects 95% of the residents will have power by Dec. 15, nearly three months after Maria made landfall Sept. 20.
In facing the New York Yankees in the next two or possibly three games of the American League Championship Series, the Astros will be playing in a city where many can relate to the Puerto Ricans’ pain. According to the 2010 Census, 724,000 people of Puerto Rican descent live in New York, by far the largest figure of any city in the country.
A countless number of them can share stories similar to what some of the Astros players endured, and they are sorrowful. Cintron’s mother lost her house. So did Centeno’s uncle. Everyday living is still an ordeal for most folks on the island, and the Astros felt it.
“We would sit together and it was like a support group. ‘Did you see this? Did you see that? Wow, that’s unreal. Incredible,’ ’’ Cora said. “It was hard, and it still is. People don’t realize that the folks
“We would sit together and it was like a support group. ‘Did you see this? Did you see that? Wow, that’s unreal. Incredible.’ It was hard, and it still is. People don’t realize that the folks there were living through it and just surviving.”
Astros coach Joey Cora, on the devastation in Puerto Rico
there were living through it and just surviving, but they didn’t really know what was going on. We would see all the visuals, and it made you feel desperate.”
All five Puerto Ricans will be forever grateful to team owner Jim Crane, who sent planes twice, once to bring back relatives of team members — and even some not affiliated with the club, as the family of Los Angeles Dodgers utilityman Kike Hernandez — and the other one loaded with supplies.
Correa’s relatives wouldn’t come join him in Houston, reluctant to leave home, so he did the next best thing he could think of, get them generators to power the house. He also sent 100,000 pounds of food and water to his family, church and the people in his hometown of Santa Isabel on the southern end of the island.
Correa, the hero of Game 2 of the ALCS, acknowledged difficulty in keeping his mind in the game the first few days while his relatives remained incommunicado.
“It was hard to concentrate, because I didn’t know anything about my family,” he said, “but as soon as I heard from them I could focus again and do my job.”
While Harvey mostly inconvenienced the players, general manager Jeff Luhnow said 22 Astros families suffered partial or total losses to their houses and cars.
He was also affected by another calamity, as his father, stepmother and brother were in Mexico during the Sept. 19 earthquake that killed more than 200. His father’s family suffered structural damage to their property.
Luhnow said everybody on the team knows someone who was affected by Harvey, and they have been responsive to the local community.
But he understands why the damage done by Maria hit so close to home for the Puerto Ricans on the team.
“The devastation in Puerto Rico hit so personally to our players because they take such pride in being from there and they have family members who live there,” Luhnow said. “They consider it their first home, and they always will.”