HOUSTON -- Astros owner Jim Crane would gaze around the empty ballpark some nights in those early seasons and wonder if the place would ever be full again. Sponsors? He can laugh now about how that pursuit went.

“I got thrown out of a few buildings,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of interest in the team. People like winners, and the product had kind of deteriorated.”

These days, the Astros are one of baseball’s model franchises on and off the field as they prepare to play Game 1 of an American League Division Series on Friday at Minute Maid Park.

The Astros have won the AL West three straight seasons and have been to the playoffs four times in five years. Crane’s original blueprint after he bought the Astros in late 2011 was a full-blown rebuild. He hired Jeff Luhnow from the Cardinals to oversee baseball operations. Perhaps the most remarkable thing Crane did was stay the course even when a turnaround seemed a million miles away.

“It’s hard to walk around your community when you’re losing 100 games and have people tell you everyday that you’re dumb and you’re stupid and your plan is not going to work,” Astros president Reid Ryan said.

“What I learned is that Jim has really thick skin and that he’s an amazing guy. He just knew for us to be competitive we had to follow that model really like the Cardinals have had for years, which is live within your means, develop from within and build it yourself and complement it with free agents. If you ask anybody in Houston, the pain was worth where we are today. Now the goal is to sustain this thing as long as we can.”

Crane’s baseball team just became the sixth in history to win 100 games in three straight seasons. Local radio and television ratings are soaring. Attendance, which bottomed out at 1.6 million in 2012, has been 2.98 and 2.86 million the past two seasons.

“I don’t think Jim Crane gets enough credit,” Ryan said. “He’s not only the best owner in Houston. I think he’s the best owner in baseball. He literally laid out a plan, and that plan was to put everything we did back into the on-field product and try to win championships. He wants to be the best at everything he does. I’m just blessed to get to be a part of it.”

Houston’s 311 victories the last three seasons are the most since the Orioles won 318 in the 1969-71 seasons. Now as the Astros attempt to win the World Series for the second time in three seasons, Crane is vowing, sort of, to enjoy the ride a bit more.

“You get there, bang, it kind of hits you,” he said of winning the World Series. “You’re stunned. What do you do now? I think we’ll take it in a little more, kind of move a little slower this time and really enjoy it as we move along.”