The one sport I follow and pay the most attention to is baseball. Football is boring to me, and I think far too much attention is lavished on it, especially at the college level. Basketball is decent, but it doesn’t keep my attention. I don’t understand soccer. But baseball, that’s my sport. Since moving to Houston in 1981, my team is the Houston Astros. They have won the World Series twice, in 2017 and 2022; the American League pennant four times, in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2022; and the American League West Division eight times, in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2026. And that was after they switched from the National League to the American League.
They started as an expansion team, the Houston Colt .45s, along with the New York Mets in 1962, before adopting the name Astros in 1965. The Astrodome, "the Eighth Wonder of the World," was built for them. They played in the Astrodome through 1999, when they left to play in Daikin Park, formerly Minute Maid Park and Enron Field, when the ballpark opened in 2000. As a longtime fan, I can say they were a mediocre team for most of their existence. Like most teams in Houston, they were middle of the road. There were some years when they were absolutely awful, and to get people in the seats, tickets were either one dollar or free. As noted above, they made the playoffs more than a few times, in both leagues, and have always given their fans quite an experience.
Related: I Hated the Home Run, I Loved What Came Before It.
2017 was the year that the Houston Astros demonstrated just how much they mean to the City of Houston. 2017 was the year of Hurricane Harvey, a hurricane so devastating that its name has been retired, never to be used again. Houston got an entire year’s worth of rain in less than four days. The average yearly rainfall total for Houston is 51.84 inches. The peak level of rainfall during Harvey was 60.58 inches.
Houston, with few exceptions, is absolutely flat, such as The Heights, a historic neighborhood, which is twenty-three feet higher than downtown Houston. Houston has an amazing drainage system, built over decades of storms and hurricanes, but five feet of water in four days was just too much. The deluge overwhelmed the drainage system, the bayous, even the retention ponds built for this specific purpose.
Places I have never seen flood did. The local CBS station was forced off the air after the station, located along one of the bayous, flooded out. They had to “borrow” a signal from a sister station in Dallas. I had friends in Dallas asking me why they had a CBS station in Houston on their ABC station. Daikin Park, then known as Minute Maid Park, flooded out, and so did the streets around the baseball stadium. Unless you had a boat, you weren’t going anywhere in Houston.
When Harvey struck, the Astros had a record of 75 wins and 50 losses. They wound up playing the series, scheduled to be in Houston, in Tampa Bay. The Texas Rangers, the team they were playing in the series, couldn’t be bothered to switch stadiums with the Astros, claiming scheduling conflicts. Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, where the Rangers play, is 256 miles from Houston. Tropicana Field, where the Tampa Bay Rays play, is 1,002 miles from Houston. The Astros had to travel four times as far, because the Rangers couldn’t see beyond their own noses. To this day, every time the Rangers lose, I smile. That year? The Rangers didn’t make the playoffs. They finished third.
As Houston slowly dried out and began to rebuild, the Astros kept winning. On Sept. 17, 2017, the Astros clinched the American League West Division for the first time. They defeated the Red Sox on September 29 to claim 100 wins, something that hadn’t happened since 1998. They defeated the Red Sox again in the American League Division Series in four games, and then defeated the New York Yankees in seven games for their first American League pennant. They defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games and won their first World Series on Nov. 1, 2017, becoming the first team from Texas to do so. Over 750,000 people crammed into downtown Houston to attend the parade for the Astros and celebrate their win. My sibling was there.
My sibling had a dedicated parking space in one of the offices in downtown. So, using that, my sibling went to the parade with some friends and had an awesome time. With that many people in one place, problems can develop: cars can be broken into, things set on fire, businesses broken into. None of that happened. NONE. It was one of the most joyful days in Houston that I can remember. For all of those who had lost everything to the flood waters, the Astros represented hope. It was something positive to take their minds off the terrible mess facing them, however much or little was left.
Related: 25 Years After a Historic Anthem, Jesse McGuire Delivered Another One
If you had power and a TV, you could watch the Astros in the playoffs. For a couple of hours, you didn’t have to worry about how much more drywall needed to be removed before mold took over, or how you were going to pay for everything if you didn’t (or did) have insurance. I have a picture I’ve saved from the local news of a couple sitting in their house with everything gone. The house is ripped down to the wooden studs. They’re both seated in collapsible chairs. They have a portable light attached to the ceiling, the TV is balanced on a large cooler, and that’s all the furniture there is.
The man, dressed in an Astros shirt and cap, is standing up with his hands on his head, yelling. The woman, also wearing an Astros shirt and cap, is seated and yelling. That game gave them a break from the disaster they had just survived. That picture encapsulates what the Astros meant to Houston as it rebuilt. The local news went back to talk to that man and his wife when the Astros were in the playoffs in 2019. They all joked about how the house had furniture now. We Houstonians are a hardy bunch, but even the hardiest people need to be lifted up once in a while. The Astros winning the World Series was exactly what the city needed.
The Astros won another World Series in 2022. They are usually in the playoffs, sometimes not for very long (like this year). And, yes, there was a “scandal” about sign stealing in 2019 by a former player who is no longer in Major League Baseball. I mention it only because someone reading this will feel the need to say something about it. The record still shows that the Houston Astros won the 2017 World Series. A replica trophy is still at Daikin Field. That’s all that matters.