We also were an eclectic team-loving family. We lived in West Palm Beach, down in South Florida. Usually people gravitate towards teams that are close or that are generational. Dad grew up in Vermont, so there wasn't any hometown team. Lots of New Englanders lean towards the Boston teams, but he only did that for the Celtics. He was a huge Bears fan; I have no clue where that allegiance originated. He didn't cheer for anyone in baseball. The natural thing would have been to cheer for the Miami teams, since they were the closest. But there is something a lot of people don't know about Floridians: lots of Floridians detest Miami. I am one of those. Miami is not the same as Florida. There is very little I like about Miami, except the Cuban food. So my natural inclination was to cheer against any Miami team. My dad did like The U's football team, but that was mostly because they were mean. (Not joking.) As for the rest of us, my brother liked the Lakers, Redskins, and Southern Cal - he hated baseball. My sister didn't care. My mom cheered for the Broncos, because of John Elway (this is not the most confusing of my mom's stances, but it is up there). My grandmother loved the Bravos. I hated them.I was a pretty typical kid, a front runner. I picked my teams because they were doing well when I was young: Yankees, Cowboys, University of Georgia. I did like the Hawks, but mostly because of Dominique Wilkins.
The Cowboys and Yankees remained my teams through college and into my 20s. But then I started to wonder why I liked these teams. They both were teams with a massive fanbase, which actually made them kind of annoying. They were the proverbial bandwagon teams in each league. And, more that that, they didn't do business the way I felt groups should do business. Jerry Jones owned the Cowboys and he was/is a obnoxious narcissistic person. He kicked one the most revered coaches (Tom Landry) to the curb without remorse. He kicked his own friend and successful coach (Jimmy Johnson) to the curb because Johnson got too much credit for the Cowboys' success. And in the decades since that, he has made so many stupid decisions just because he wanted to be right. I ended up switching to the Jaguars because my wife's family lived in Jacksonville and would go to games once in a while. Also, my argument for the Magic could be used here (proximity, didn't exist in 1980).
The Yankees were a different story. I mostly walked away from baseball after they lost a season to a strike. I would wander back and forth to the sport when notable things happened: Cal Ripken's attendance record, home run record chase, Yankees winning. But time and again, I kept walking away. And I really got sick of the Yankees. They made a joke of the salary cap, basically buying their way to World Series after World Series and dared to call it "a dynasty." How is it a dynasty when you're paying twice as much for players as everyone else? But the killer moment for me was the Mitchell Report about steroid use. Twenty-six Yankees were named in the report as using performance enhancing drugs. Twenty-six! That is, as the NCAA says, a lack of institutional control. I was done with them and with baseball. I was interested when the Rays made it to the World Series - a team with extremely low payroll making it due to great players and coaching (what a concept). I made the kids pay attention when the Cubs won the Series because it was history making. Overall, though, baseball was less important than hockey.
Then we moved to Houston.
Then Hurricane Harvey hit. I remember the Yankees going to the World Series after 9/11 and the Saints winning the Super Bowl right after Katrina, and how it seemed like supernatural forces made those things happen. They were called teams of destiny. That is totally what happened in Houston in 2017. The city had been beaten and bruised. We all felt horrible and completely overwhelmed by what had happened. How does a city recover from a flood of that magnitude. We had lived in Columbia during their flood just a couple of years earlier, but Harvey made that one seem small. The Astros were on a road trip during the storm and couldn't get back home to play. The Texas Rangers forever got on my poop list for how they wouldn't help. But the team talked about how they felt, flying over the city. They looked out the windows and wept, knowing friends and family were struggled down below. And it pushed them. I think it pushed management to trade for Justin Verlander. That news hit my phone while I was sitting in our crappy hotel during our forced evacuation. Even reading it made me happy. The team came home and put the city on its back. We went to the second game after the flooding. They had first responders on the field to thank them. There were so many things going on to help the victims and shine light on the situation. While St. JJ Watt was raising his millions, the Astros were lifting up their millions. The water slowly receded, the city slowly recovered, and the Astros went on a tear. The whole city could feel it. The team of destiny. It was as if the Houston Metroplex was pushing energy into those players. The number of last minute comebacks? Verlander was unbeatable. They stormed through the rest of the season like a juggernaut and hit the playoffs.
I had been around successful teams in the past. The Magic made a finals run while I was in Orlando. The Bucs won a Super Bowl while I later lived in Orlando. South Carolina had several sports teams have title-chasing and title-winning seasons. Clemson has also been quite successful while we lived in the Palmetto State. And that UCF National Title, of course. But I have never felt anything like the Astros 2017 playoff run. People everywhere had Astros gear on. It was actually hard to get stuff, so many people had been buying it. I remember walking out of Target one day with my Astros shirt on. An older lady asked me if the game had started yet. Another guy yelled "Astroooos." The kids would jump in the car after school and ask what the score was. (We had to play all the afternoon games because, face it, the Astros still aren't the Yankees or Red Sox or Dodgers.) Houston took out the Red Sox 3 games to 1. Then they had to fight the Yankees. (Grrrrrr) They went up in the series, but then fell behind 3 games to 2. New York had to win one game. But, in classic Astros style, they won both games behind their powerful lineup and great pitching. They were in the World Series.
The teams in 2018 and 2019 both made impressive runs. They didn't make the series in 2018, but still were fun to watch and cheer for. We moved back to South Carolina, but still followed the Astros religiously. Our kids would be the only ones in the classes with Houston gear on, but we didn't care. The 2019 World Series was heartbreaking. How come the Astros, who were so dominant at home, never could win in their own stadium? They seemed like a different team in DC vs Houston. In the end, Washington got their title and Houston figured it would just gear up for next year. Even though a bizarrely large number of free agents left, there was still the belief that Jeff Luhnow and AJ Hinch would keep things rolling.
Rumors of sign stealing started to circulate. It was hard to hear. Like most fans, I wanted to give my team the benefit of the doubt. They won outright on the field. They were just the better team. Louder rumors swirled. They are good guys. Remember how they embraced the city? Altuuuuuuve. A former player dropped the bomb and flat out stated that the team was stealing signs. He said how it was done and how often. There was no denying it at this point. The league got involved. I didn't want to believe it. I still hoped this dude was lying or something. Nope. Hinch and Luhnow are suspended for a year. "Oh no. Well Sean Payton was suspended for a...." Then they were fired. The team was fined. No players were punished, but so many were implicated. Even the former "heart and soul" players like Alex Cora and Carlos Beltran go fired from their new manager jobs because they were named as two of players who the formulated the scheme. Since then, the Astros have been about as tone-deaf as a team can be. Their social media team has been working overtime, trying to distract everyone from the situation. They haven't talked about it, but they have waved around the awards they won last year. And they had their fan appreciation day. And they made appearances. And they let two really good men take all the blame. And they hope that the city will forget what happened.
Even 2017. That is what makes me the most outraged. All of that goodwill and destiny was manufactured. It wasn't real. They weren't playing fair. When Yu Darvish unraveled in the games against Houston, was it really him tipping pitches? Or was it the Astros stealing them? Those great guys we rooted for? The gutsy, come from behind, never say die players. They were cheating? Of course they came back later in a game. By then they had seen multiple appearances by starting pitchers or they saw relievers they had a compendium of stolen signs from. That title feels dirty. That experience of an entire city pushing a team forward - it isn't so amazing when the team had greased the track in front of them. And I know that this is probably not isolated to Houston. But I don't care. "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it?" I want my kids to have integrity when no one is watching and when everyone is. I want them to be the one kid in the room not cheating, the one worker not padding stats, the one driver following rules, the one taxpayer filing honestly, the one person who returns extra change or extra accidental products, the one customer who points out when the waiter forgets to charge for a drink. How can I want them to live up to that standard and then cheer for people who don't? Trust me, this question troubles me on many fronts in our world today. But with sports, at least in that realm I can do something about it. I have that world in my control. So I will walk away from baseball again. I'll turn my back on the Houston Astros. We had some fun, but I don't know if any of it was real. And I don't need that kind of garbage in my life.
