The Houston Astros began as the Houston Colt .45s in 1962, and took 55 years to win their first World Series championship. The wait was a long one, but it couldn’t have ended at a better time – when the city was seeking to rebound from hurricane Harvey, one of the worst and costliest natural disasters in US history. And to top it off, the Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games with a roster assembled using NASA-inspired analytics. This victory for the ages cried out for a retrospective, and who better to handle the honors than a native Texan, Joe Holley, who is the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle and the former press secretary and speech writer for Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Here’s an excerpt from Hurricane Season:
“A year that began with Houston enthusiastically hosting thousands of football fans and partygoers in town for Super Bowl LI at NRG Stadium – New England Patriots 34, Atlanta Falcons 28 – rolled toward its end with a rollicking downtown parade on a glorious November morning, a morning that felt like the happy merging of summer and fall for a city that knows what it’s like to be pummeled by the weather. Houston was hosting its first victory parade since the celebrations honoring the NBA’s Houston Rockets in 1994 and 1995.
“Four NASA T-38 jets piloted by astronauts soared over a sea of orange and blue along the 29-block parade route. More than 750,000 jubilant fans – including school kids officially off for the day – lined streets that had been flooded just nine weeks before.They had come downtown to welcome the World Champion Astros. They hung out of multilevel parking garages and office buildings, watched from the limbs of trees along the parade route and screamed with joy when Jose Altuve, George Springer, Carlos Correa, Alex Bergman, and the rest of the guys rode through a blizzard of confetti fluttering down from skyscrapers."