A plus from Friday’s loss? Astros win ALCS at home
For a subset of some 41,000 Astros fans, the club’s Game 5 loss to the Yankees on Friday night offered a silver lining: They could punch their Game 6 tickets in Houston.
A win Friday would have meant the Astros sealed the American League Championship Series without needing to return to Houston on Saturday night. Fans filed into Minute Maid Park on Saturday with the hopes of watching their team advance to the World Series.
Valuable tickets aside, most fans said they would have been perfectly content to see the team win Friday. They cited superstition and their unwavering devotion to the ’Stros.
One daring fan admitted otherwise.
“I wanted them to lose,” said Ashley George of her beloved Astros’ Friday outing. “I’m going to be for real, I did.”
George, who was at Saturday’s game with her parents and fiancée, wasn’t concerned about giving the Yankees extra life. Now, she said she gets to see the Astros
send them packing from stadium seats, instead of a couch or a bar.
Other fans shared George’s confidence. The Lancaster family, who has attended every home playoff game this year, was hoping for the refund that comes with a canceled game.
“I was pissed,” said Rachel Lancaster. Her husband, Mark, said he was hoping the Astros would clinch in New York to put “salt in the wounds” of sour Yankees fans, who Astros players said this week were throwing items on the field and being otherwise disrespectful.
But like George, the Lancasters were certain the Astros would win the series. And it’s hard to complain when you’re at the park, they agreed.
Their daughter, 2-year-old Taylor, wore an orange Astros jersey and eye black. She wants to be a baseball player, they said. Her favorite player is outfielder Jake Marisnick. When asked if the Astros would win, Taylor offered an affirmative nod.
“We’re going to seal it,” Mark added.
That confidence was rewarded early. In the bottom of the first inning, Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel blasted a three-run homer to right field. The home crowd erupted in cheers, waving their rally towels in the air and exchanging high fives.
One such cheer came from Colin Karamales and Leah Hill, who got last-minute standing-room tickets from a co-worker. In right field, they exchanged high fives with a security guard after Gurriel’s blast.
Karamales said he was at Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS, when the Astros beat the Yankees to advance to that World Series. He was hoping to witness something similar Saturday.
“Seems to be going well so far,” he said as the Astros clung to a narrow lead at 9 p.m. Saturday.
Pat Freeman and his family said they had little doubt the team would pull it off. Mostly, he said with a grin, because the Yankees just aren’t good.
Pat and his wife, Laurie, had Game 7 tickets in the 1980s when the Astros dropped the series’ Game 6 and were sent home. That didn’t mean they weren’t rooting for the Astros on Friday night.
“We had a no-lose situation,” Pat said.
Laurie said the tickets made the loss bittersweet.
“I was mad, but then I was like, ‘Oh well, we get to go to the game now,’ ” she said. Freeman has been going to games since she was a little kid, running laps around the Astrodome.
Game 6, though, was her first playoff game, adding to the excitement.
Harvest Reynolds and Jarred Shows, friends from Baton Rouge, La., were watching Friday’s game with a hopeful eye toward making the trip. Shows, an Astros fan, was one of the few home-field fans to admit that desire. He wore a “Verlander Cole 2020” shirt and expressed the same confidence in the Astros.
Reynolds was decked out in Yankees gear, though. He defected from the Astros back when they traded his favorite player away in the early 2000s. He said he was also here in the earlier Yankees-Astros series in 2017 as well.
Yankees fans in enemy territory Saturday night had no conflicted feelings at all. Rob Shepas, 76, was in town from Allegany, N.Y., where he’s been rooting for the pinstriped Yanks since he was 7 years old.
Shepas and his daughter, Amy O’Dell, were in town for an air show this weekend. So when they realized the series would return to town, it only made a Game 5 win even sweeter.
His niece, Annette Torgerson, who lives near Clear Lake, said the tickets made the loss sting a bit less. She and her daughter, Alyssa Heater, were decked in Astros garb while Shepas and O’Dell donned the Yankees’ navy blue.
They’ll joke with each other during the game, but there won’t be any intrafamily civil war, Shepas said: His family and Texans in general have taken too good care of him.
“It’s just a baseball game,” Shepas said.