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LOS ANGELES—Jeff Luhnow inherited the worst team in the majors in the autumn of 2011, tasked with the unenviable responsibility of fixing a broken organization with no direction, no plan and no answers. The Houston Astros lost 106 games the season before Luhnow arrived, saddled with a farm system that ranked among the league’s worst and a budget that prevented them from spending their way out of the abyss.
Less than six years later, those Astros ascended to the top of the baseball world, validating a paradigm-shifting experiment…