LOS ANGELES — The Houston Astros were a joke. A literal punchline to whatever baseball joke you could come up with. They were “The Aristocrats!” of baseball, something you could say at the end of a long, drawn out explanation of utter and total baseball incompetence. Say the word “Astros,” and you would get laughs.

The Houston Astros are World Series champions for the first time in their 56-year history.

It took skill, luck, talent, and smarts, which is what it took for every other championship team before them. The 2017 Astros were an incredible collection of talent. They were found talent, acquired talent, developed talent, and bought talent. They won 101 games in the regular season, and then they won 11 games after that. When future generations look back at the 2017 season, they won’t think, “Now how did that happen?” It makes sense. What with the talent and all.

But I want to talk about how bad they were if that’s okay.

I can’t stop thinking about this.

… not a single, solitary Nielsen household tuned in for as long as a few minutes in any given quarter-hour to watch the Astros lose to the Indians for their 105th defeat of the year.

The Astros pulled a 0.0 Nielsen rating for a regular season game in 2013. A total goose egg. The next year, it happened again. It was possible to sample nearly 600 Houston households and not find a single one that would turn the Astros on for a second. For perspective, note that about four percent of the population believe that lizard people control the government. Five percent believe Paul McCartney has been dead for decades.

Zero percent were willing to watch the Astros on purpose in 2013 or 2014, give or take.

And those people shouldn’t be blamed. The Astros were transcendentally terrible. If you want moving images, here’s a tidy collection. If you want words, oh, there are words. If you want a single video, this will do:

The Houston Astros are World Series champions, though. It didn’t take witchcraft or space-age technology. They put out a “QUIET! WE’RE SUCKING TO GET BETTER” sign in front of Minute Maid Park, and they asked for patience, which they couldn’t possibly have expected to get. Then they built the foundation. Then the frame, then the plumbing, a little drywall, and it was up before we had a chance to realize it.

Suddenly, the Astros were a contender. The high draft picks, the deep farm system, and the twists of fate conspired to make them relevant again. But contending teams are a dime a dozen. The Twins made the postseason this year. The Rockies, too. The Angels and Brewers cared about what was going on in September, somehow. Next year, the Marlins, A’s, and Rays might all care about September.

No, the Astros were a contender, a juggernaut, a team with enviable talent stacked upon enviable talent. It’s important to remember how they got that talent.

There were the players who required a lot of losing. The Astros lost 86 games to get George Springer. Tommy Manzella started more games at shortstop for them than anyone else in 2010, and that’s part of how they got Springer. They lost 106 games in 2011 to get Carlos Correa and Lance McCullers. They lost 107 games in 2012 to get Not Kris Bryant, who turned into Ken Giles, who most definitely didn’t close out Game 7.

They lost 111 games in 2014 to almost get Brady Aiken, which is how they ended up with Alex Bregman in a roundabout way, but that was all a huge mess. People are still arguing about it.

They weren’t all nonsensical losing seasons, though. They built players, too. Charlie Morton was someone available to all 30 teams, but only one of them was creative enough to sign him. Dallas Keuchel was a 23-year-old non-prospect, striking out five batters per nine innings in Double-A. He was brought up to the majors because the Astros were that bad. The new guard rebuilt him and turned him into a Cy Young winner.

They bought players. Brian McCann came over because the Yankees wanted to shed payroll, which is inherently funny. Yuli Gurriel was a high-risk investment, and because of his advanced age, that move didn’t have a huge window with which to work. Carlos Beltran and Josh Reddick sure weren’t cheap.

They traded for players. Justin Verlander was the obvious get, but there were more than that. They gave up a strong prospect to get Evan Gattis. They made a lesser deal with the A’s to get Brad Peacock.

Perhaps most importantly, they inherited players from the people who built those 110-loss teams. I keep thinking about Jose Altuve, who was brought up as a sacrificial lamb in 2011, straight from the low minors. Someone from the Bad Astros had to recognize him as a diamond in the rough and follow through with that evaluation, signing him and developing him, and all that. Keuchel was already here and nothing more than a generic organizational arm. A particularly funny one is Marwin Gonzalez, who came over in the Rule 5 Draft the same day in 2012 that GM Jeff Luhnow was officially hired. That’s a heckuva mint to leave on the pillow for the new guys.

It all coalesced into a team of disparate parts that liked each other. They were from all over the globe. The World Series MVP was Connecticut-born to parents from Panama and Puerto Rico. There was Cuba and Puerto Rico and Venezuela and New Mexico, and the Jewish kid from New Mexico really wanted to learn Spanish so he could speak to his teammates from Cuba and Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

This team, the one that rose out of the depths of the deepest, stinkiest compost pile, that was cobbled together and reinvented itself several times over, was the one in place for a city that needed something to distract itself from Hurricane Harvey. There are still people without homes, people who need a car to function, and the damage isn’t completely fixed, not even close.

But everyone can rally around the sports, now. It’s a small token, but it’s an important one. In Houston, everyone was jabbering about the Astros. There were handwritten notes on the menus of restaurants all over town, and there were large, silkscreen signs in front of the hotels. The Nielsen rating was higher than 0.0 this October. Everyone was very much into this team winning for this city.

It took transactions, sleights of hand, unexpected developments. players left over from the last tenants, and talent, talent, talent. Oh, how the Astros had talent. Their star middle infielders were a second baseman who was cross between Bilbo Baggins and Pete Rose, and a shortstop who was a Greek god with puppy dog feet.

They weren’t a joke anymore, an automatic punchline. The 2017 Houston Astros were the best team around, and they went through the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers to get there. That’s 366 combined years of baseball history standing in their way, and the Astros navigated it deftly.

The Astros are World Series champions. If you were around in 2011 or 2012, that still reads weird, right? They were so bad, everyone.