Bob Nightengale

USA TODAY Sports

PALM BEACH, FLA. -- Houston Astros owner Jim Crane pulls past the orange cones, into the dirt parking lot, and, in every direction he looks, sees scaffolding and men running in wearing hard hats.

He walks inside the sprawling building, and there’s nothing but empty walls, unfinished floors, strewn plumbing fixtures, offices without desks or doors. In the backyard, there are baseball fields in all directions, but none yet ready to even play a game of catch.

“Sixteen months ago,” Crane says, “these 150 acres was nothing more than a trash dump. That was it. Just a wasteland.”

Today, it is home.

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Well, at least the new $150 million spring training home of the Astros and Washington Nationals, still heavily under construction, with 600 workers on-site Thursday, frantically trying to get it ready.

“It will be done by next year, right?” Crane cracked to Marcel Braithwaite, the Astros’ senior vice president of business operations.

They have until Feb. 14, the first day pitchers and catchers report to work at the multiteam facility, made possible by $113 million in financing from Palm Beach County taxpayers.

When you take a walking tour with Crane around the gorgeous complex, with every amenity known to man, including eight 70-inch TVs in their clubhouse and a 15,000-square-foot weight room, you wonder how it possibly can be ready in two weeks.

But there’s no need to stress.

The real heavy lifting of the entire Astros organization has been completed, with Crane turning an archaic organization that hated to even spend money on draft picks into a state-of-the art franchise

The days of being baseball’s laughingstock, with that 111-loss season and three consecutive years of losing 106 games or more are over, with Crane vowing it will never happen again.

The Astros truly believe that this could be their year.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” Crane told USA TODAY Sports, “but expect to be in the playoffs. When you get there, anything can happen, but we should definitely be right there.”

They opened their checkbook and brought in All-Stars Carlos Beltran, Brian McCann and Josh Reddick, and now plan to grab one more starting pitcher. They have been primarily focusing on Jose Quintana of the Chicago White Sox and Sonny Gray of the Oakland Athletics, Crane says.

“You always need more pitching,” Crane says. “We would have loved to have (Aroldis) Chapman and (Chris) Sale, too. But we’re a midmarket team. We look at a lot of stuff but can’t go crazy on the payroll. We can’t afford to make a mistake on a bad contract.

“When I bought the team I said, ‘I’ll spend what I’ve got, but I’m not going to go broke.’ The other guys can run a lot higher payroll and still pay the bills. When L.A. has $200 million in rights fees and I’ve got $60 million, it’s hard to close that gap.

“But I think if we operate efficiently, and we make good decisions and don’t go over our skis, we’ll be able to complete with anybody.”

Who knows, even after all of the pain and embarrassment of the federal investigation that discovered the sordid details of St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa’s computer espionage into the Astros’ database, it could turn out to be a blessing.

“That was a mess,” Crane said. “There’s not a ton I can say about it, but it was pretty egregious. He had access to all our data. He was cross-referencing all his decisions with our (information). There was a lot of time and a lot of money spent on what we found out he was doing.

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“The problem is that these guys are good with that stuff; they think they’re bulletproof. What was it worth? That was the commissioner’s call. But I think it was a fair resolution. I think you had to send a clear message.”

While Correa was sent to federal prison for 46 months, the Cardinals were forced to surrender their top two picks in the June draft to the Astros, along with $2 million. Suddenly, with a surplus of draft picks, the pain of giving up top prospects for Quintana or someone else could be eased.

“We’re hoping that something will break,” Crane said. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that ... getting two picks from the Cardinals gives us more depth in the system. We’re still looking into it.

“The thing about pitching is that it keeps games under control. And you got to have someone who can slam that door.”

If the Astros land one more front-line starter, there’s nothing that should stand in their way of being perennial playoff contenders, culminating a renovation that’s included tearing out Tal’s Hill in Minute Maid Park to re-thinking processes throughout scouting and player development.

“We were behind the curve in everything, not just the major league team,” says Crane, an All-American pitcher at the University of Central Missouri, who was inducted last weekend into the Missouri Hall of Fame. “We got it working now. We got the revenues up. We got the fans re-engaged. It really takes all of us behind it to make it work right, and we weren’t really good at any of it behind us.

“I’m happy with the progress, but I still want to win something. The ultimate goal is to win a championship. Our goal is to be competitive every single year, get in the playoffs and hopefully get on a run.”

There have been plenty of ugly days for Crane since buying the team, with dreadful seasons and a nasty TV dispute that meant few fans could watch their games, but never once did he have remorse, always believing he could make a difference.

“Sometimes you have to revamp the whole business to kind of reinvent yourself,” Crane said. “We caught some heat doing it, but it was the only way we could get out of the ditch. People thought we were throwing games to get picks. We weren’t doing that. We were just rebuilding the team. Now, look at us.”

And in two weeks, with construction crews working around the clock, the Astros hope to be saying the same about their spring training facility, even designed to be hurricane-proof.

“It’s been a scramble,” Crane says, “so you’ve got to use your imagination a little. But when this is done, it’s sure going to be something.”

The same, of course, can be said of the Astros.