“One of the first things I did was ask them to take it out,” he said in an interview there, a few months after taking the job. “Depth charts are something that I can get online at the stroke of a button.”

Luhnow — who did not respond to an interview request for this article — inherited a team with the majors’ worst record and a poorly regarded farm system. A new collective bargaining agreement had made losing more attractive by providing the worst teams with the most money to spend on amateur talent, so the Astros unloaded veterans and prepared for a stretch of several painful seasons.

“The players couldn’t understand why the best 25 guys weren’t breaking camp with us,” said Dave Trembley, who coached for the Astros in 2013 and 2014. “We tried to develop those guys as best we could, we had early work every day, we’d come out and do fundamentals. But it was a tough situation trying to keep the players motivated knowing that they were pretty much aware of what the plan was.”

Even before the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers popularized it, the Astros used the word “process” as a euphemism for tanking — a strategy of fielding a threadbare roster to get better prospects and accelerate a rebuild. Houston’s attendance sank below 1.7 million, a 20-year low for a non-strike season, but Luhnow eagerly sold fans on his logic. The team’s supporters, in turn, embraced his bold vision to put the Astros at the forefront of baseball’s analytical and technological revolution.

“To me, there was nothing sinister about what they were doing; they were just on that leading edge and they wanted to show it off a little bit,” said the Texas Rangers broadcaster Dave Raymond, who was the Astros’ radio play-by-play voice from 2006 through 2012. “They brilliantly educated the fan base on what they were doing and how they were going about it. One of the most interesting parts of the process was how the fans really embraced the losing. They believed immediately.”