I have seen my favorite football team win a Super Bowl (and my favorite QB win a second). I've seen my adopted favorite basketball team win five NBA titles. I've seen my hockey team win three Stanley Cups, and go to two more finals. I've seen my favorite tennis player win 16 Grand Slams. I've seen and experienced every joy and ecstasy a sports fan can. There was only one hole in that. And now it is filled. My team won a World Series. That franchise won a World Series. The Astros completed their epic rebuild, slayed three of the most historic dragons in baseball, and won a World Series. Life is complete.
This shouldn't have happened. Not the Astros winning, but me witnessing it. I was supposed to be in a land far away, in South Africa, a trip I had meticulously planned for months. Instead, by a cruel twist of fate, I was at home, reconsidering all my life choices after failing to check the requirements for entry into South Africa, and that it required a fully blank page in one's passport. 30 hours before Game 7 started, I was in JFK airport, at the South African Airways counter, when they told me that I was not going to be able to board. After cycling through all the stages of grief really quickly, I had decided the one thing that could make that disaster OK was if the Astros won the World Series.
They did. Man did they. Game 7 was anti-climactic, sure, but as an Astros fan that cycled through too many series of fingernails and guts over the first 6 bananas game, it was still tense. The Dodgers threatened so many times. The first three innings were the longest of my life, with the Dodgers getting multiple baserunners on each time, but none of them scored. The hard-hit balls went straight to Astros players. Luck was on their side. So was Charlie Morton.
The construction of a Championship roster was multi-layered, with numerous sources. The high draft picks taken as a result of quasi-blatant tanking made up part of the core (Correa, Bregman, McCullers), but so did leftovers from the old Ed Wade regime (Altuve, Keuchel, Springer), and so did a slew of veteran hires this offseason (Beltran, McCann, Reddick). The most curious of these pieces was Morton, a non-descript starter for a half-decade in Pittsburgh. The Astros signed him to a 2-year/$14m deal, a lot of money for them for that. It paid off handsomely.
The Astros 2017 World Series may now seem somewhat pre-ordained. Sports Illustrated ran their infamous cover story about the Astros winning this very series in 2014. To be sure, great things were expected of this team. But it still serves to reason to remember just how far this seemed back when that cover ran - the year the Astros escaped the wilderness. 2014 was the year it started to, in reality, come together. Springer was called up, the first of the Astros high-profile draft picks. It was the year Altuve won his first batting title. It was the year Keuchel turned things around. It was the year they stopped losing 100+ games, losing just 92.
2011-2013 was about as dark a three year period as you can have as a fan of a team. The first year they weren't even notably, or at least notoriously tanking, but just purely putrid after years of terrible decisions. They sold away their top assets in Berkman, Oswalt and Pence, getting the rebuild started in earnest. Luhnow took over in 2012 and hit hyperdrive, literally fielding AAA lineups. It peaked with a 111-loss 2013 season. The worst season anyone had since the Tigers lost 118 in 2003. Then 2014 came, and light was finally found at the end of that tunnel.
The Astros World Series win is the first for the franchise and potentially a start of some incredible years. Their top four position players are all under team control for at least two more years (Altuve) all the way up to 4-5 more years (Correa / Bregman). The pitching staff could use more support, but getting relievers is the cheapest place to fortify, and they have a potentially budding ace in the minors in Forrest Whitley. The Astros are primed for a great future as much as having had a great present. There could be many more World Series celebrations to come. But none will match the first.
The best part of the post-game celebration seemed to be everyone's abject joy. The Astros became the first team since the 2002 Angels to win the World Series without having a single player having won it previously. For veterans like Carlos Beltran and Justin Verlander, this was the last goal to hit before they end their probably Hall of Fame careers. For Charlie Morton, it was realizing a dream that probably should have never happened. For the young guys, it was cementing their place in the Astros history. For Carlos Correa, the guy who might have the best career of anyone on the team, it was also the right moment to get engaged. It was a celebration, from beginning to end.
I was surprisingly calm during the last two games. I watched Game 6 with my friends at a local bar, still somewhat stunned into silence by my ordeal at the airport earlier in the day. I did not expect a win, even as Verlander dominated the Dodgers through 5 innings. Going into Game 7, I had mentally accepted losing the series was a real possibility, and I was OK with that. The Dodgers are a great team, with great stories. As a Peyton Manning fan, I could easily relate to the whole 'Kershaw sucks in the playoffs' narrative, and would have been fine with losing if it meant the best pitcher I personally have ever seen would win a World Series ring. I was at peace with a loss, which makes the win all the more special.
In the end, Game 7 was a bore and may hurt the standing the 2017 Fall Classic holds historically. That said, on its full merits it was the greatest World Series I've seen since the 2001 Classic between Arizona and New York. This one had two absolutely classic games in Game 2 and Game 5. It also had an incredible pitching performance in Game 1 by Kershaw, a game that went into the 9th inning tied a 1-1 (hilariously, the game started by the #4 starters). The normal games, ended 5-3 and 3-1, before the 7th game. Comparing it to 2001, while that series had three classics in Games 4-5 in New York (the Byung-Hyun Kim meltdown games), and Game 7, it also had three Arizona blowouts in Games 1-2 and 6. There were no blowouts here.
I've followed the Astros ardently since about 2002. I don't truly know what connected me to them. I normally claim it is due to my cousin Andy, who is from Houston, and through him I got into baseball. However, I'm not really sure this is true. It's a more convenient origin story though than saying I picked them randomly. But 15 years later, I don't feel the need to defend this position. I'm a diehard, someone whose first Astros jersey was a previous incarnation, of red almost marron, and Roy Oswalt's name adorning the back. This was my series. I earned this. Houston earned this.
My favorite aspect of this run was the larger baseball world re-learning how incredible the crowds at Minute Maid Park can be. I was there watching on TV as the noise pierced through the screen in their runs to the 2004-05 NLCS's against St. Louis. So it was great to see this re-born in 2017, with multiple players and media members noting that it was about as loud as any stadium they've been in previously. Houston may not historically be a baseball town, but it is going towards earning that label.
I'll have more about the series, maybe a more full World Series retrospective, but for now, I've been given a chance to experience something for the first time in teh sports world. I'm not too old, and on the whole I've been unbelievably lucky in my rooting interests. Not as lucky as someone from Boston the past 15 years, but still very lucky. For the only gap to be a World Series Title by the time I was 16 is not too shabby, but it took a rebuild to hell and back to plug that gap. And it finally got plugged.
