Phil Garner had a ready-made answer to the question if he chose to use it. Why, I asked the former manager last Friday, did the Houston Astros plummet from their World Series appearance in 2005 to the worst season (56-106) in their 50-year history last year?

“Because they fired me in 2007,” Garner could have said. But he didn’t. The manager of the 2005 National League champions did not use the Astros’ dismissal of him to explain their demise and in every reference he made to the Astros Garner said “we.”

“Most teams, when you lose your driving force, when you have dominant players retire, you have a void,” Garner said in a telephone interview last Friday. “I saw a void in leadership. We lost our leaders in the clubhouse. They were also star players.”

Garner referred to Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, long the core and the soul of the Astros, who reached the playoffs six times in nine years with them as the leaders on the field and in the clubhouse.

Bagwell retired after the World Series, Biggio two years later. Three years after that the Astros, through their own decisions, found themselves without Brad Ausmus, Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt, three other veteran members of the team.

Garner offered a second explanation for the Astros’ devastating demise. “You have an owner who wanted to settle his estate and had the team on the market for several years,” Garner said. “He wasn’t going to put money in the team. I also think the Astros for a number of years spent more money at the major league level than the minor league level so they didn’t have a pipeline of players ready to play.”

Speaking about the team’s previous owner, Drayton McLane Jr., Garner added, “The nice thing about Drayton, when I was managing the team, he had a budget that was pretty generous. What he would do, if you were competitive at the end of the season he’d go out and get players. But at the same time we didn’t maintain a high quality minor league system.

Tal Smith was the Astros’ president of baseball operations throughout this period. He said that most critics talk about deficiencies in the team’s scouting and player development.

But, he said, “In some cases we were sacrificing top draft choices for signing free agents. Carlos Lee and Woody Williams, for example. In some cases it was adhering to recommended slotting systems. Drayton felt a strong obligation to adhere to that in all cases. As a result they have one player remaining from the 2007 draft. We gave up 1 and 2 for free agents and didn’t sign 3 and 4 because of slotting.”

In 2005, Smith recalled, he returned from an evaluation trip in the lower minors “and I was concerned. I made a strong case that we had to address these needs.” However, he also noted that “Drayton has always been concerned with marketability of brand names from his other business.”

Before he bought the Astros from John McMullen in 1992, McLane built a national grocery distribution business.

Smith said that by the end of 2007 McLane recognized that the Astros had a dearth of prospects “and we addressed it with changes in the front office.” The drafts since then, he added, have been better.

Nevertheless the Astros’ new owner, Jim Crane, saw the need for more change and fired Smith and general manager Ed Wade.

The Astros might have avoided the 2011 disaster had Crane purchased the team a couple of years ago when it appeared that he had completed a deal with McLane. The deal, however, fell through, and there are two sides to the story of why it did.

In one version, Crane reneged on the deal he had with McLane. In the other, they agreed on a sale price, but Crane said McLane kept increasing the price. One person close to the Astros quoted Crane as saying to McLane, “I agreed to the price four months ago.”

Maybe that’s when the original deal collapsed, which could make both versions correct or at least closer to each other.

Whatever the accurate version, Crane got the team late last year – first accepting the coercion of moving the Astros to the American League next year to create two 15-team leagues – and was immediately faced with improving it. He gave the job of doing that to Jeff Luhnow, the St. Louis Cardinals’ vice president for player procurement, naming him general manager.

Luhnow, 46 years old and a rookie in the job, is a latecomer to baseball, having followed a business career by joining the Cardinals in 2003. He brings to the Astros a strong and articulate belief in evaluating players, amateur and professional alike, with statistical analysis.

However, speaking by telephone from Houston Friday, he stressed that he merges the analytical system with the old-fashioned method of evaluating players through scouting.

“You can’t be too far to any one side,” Luhnow said. “I’m a big believer in having the best scouts and development guys. I have a tremendous amount of respect for scouts. They are worth their weight in gold.”

These days, though, Luhnow said, it’s necessary to mix gold, the scouts, with the silver of statistical analysis.

“It’s an important factor,” he said of analysis. “There’s so much information that goes into any player and you’re trying to compare player A to player B to Player C in your head. It’s impossible. My feeling is there are ways to utilize information that’s out there and combine it with tools that we need to look at.

“There’s an exponential growth in information that is available. Hundreds of pieces of data are in every pitch thrown every night. You can get overwhelmed so you need to figure out what’s important.

“It’s not just analyzing historical statistics, but people who are making decisions on a daily basis are trying to juggle a lot of things.”

Last month Luhnow hired a Cardinals’ colleague to help him with the juggling, naming Sig Mejdal Director of Decision Sciences. No one had a title like that when Connie Mack and Branch Rickey ran their teams. For that matter, more recently, none of George Steinbrenner’s many general managers employed anyone with a title resembling Mejdal’s.

The Astros’ news release announcing the appointment said, “Mejdal, 46, had worked with the St. Louis Cardinals since 2005, most recently as Director, Amateur Draft Analytics. While with the Cardinals, he was involved with modeling, analysis and data-driven decision making throughout all levels of the organization and was a key contributor in the draft decision processes that led to more Major League players than any other organization during that time frame.”

Citing his background, the release continued:

“Mejdal earned two engineering degrees at the University of California at Davis and later completed advanced degrees in Operations Research and Cognitive Psychology/Human Factors. He has also worked at Lockheed Martin in California and for NASA. Mejdal has been active in baseball statistics and analytics since earning his membership in The Society for Baseball Research (SABR) while in grade school.”

If the Pittsburgh Pirates had hired Mejdal back then, they could probably have avoided their record streak of 19 consecutive losing seasons.

The Cardinals turned more to statistical analysis after Luhnow joined them. In fact, Walt Jocketty, the general manager at the time, was not a big believer in statistical analysis, preferring the scouting way, and wound up leaving – or being pushed out – only a year after the Cardinals won the 2006 World Series.

“Look at what the Cardinals have done,” Luhnow said. “The Astros and Cardinals were similar in those years. Then the Cardinals went one path and the Astros another. The Cardinals won the World Series again. They have continued to win and maintained a pipeline. I’m familiar with it because I was there.”

And now he’s in Houston eager to build his own pipeline – of fans as well as players. The two goals are linked.

Attendance dropped last season to 2,067,016, the Astros’ fifth consecutive attendance decline, lowest at home since 1997 and lowest in the 12-year existence of Minute Maid Park.

“There’s a tremendous fan base,” Luhnow said, “and it’s a fan base that will support us if they see things moving in the right direction.”

Can second baseman Jose Altuve, third basemen Jimmy Paredes and Brett Wallace, catcher Jason Castro and outfielders J.D. Martinez, Jordan Schafer, Brian Boguzevic and Jason Bourgeois get the Astros moving in the right direction and bring fans back to Minute Maid Park?

They are not household names in most Houston households. Garner, in fact, remarked about the team’s left fielder, “J.D. Martinez was their rookie of the year last year. Do you know where he came from? I don’t know who he is and I don’t know where he came from.”

I didn’t know either until I looked him up, but I have learned some things about the center fielder. Schafer was arrested last October in Florida and charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. The Tampa police think they have a pretty good case against Schafer.

The player, they said, was stopped at a red light alongside an unmarked patrol car, his window open, and an unmistakable whiff of marijuana caught the attention of the officers in the unmarked car, who also said Schafer was smoking part of his supply when they pulled him over.

It was not the first time Schafer was found with an illegal substance. In 2008, when he was a top prospect in the Atlanta minor league system, he was suspended for 50 games after testing positive for human growth hormone.

“Anytime there’s a suspension or a problem with the law you have to be concerned about the image we want to present to fans,” Luhnow said.

The 2011 image wasn’t one the Astros wanted to present to their fans. Creating a new image will be Luhnow’s priority and his problem.

IS THIS ANY WAY TO BECOME A G.M.?

Bill Smith had one of the most unusual backgrounds for a general manager when he recently held that position with the Minnesota Twins’ he was a French major in college. It’s highly unlikely that Smith conducted any trade talks or free-agent negotiations in French.

Now comes Jeff Luhnow, who could easily handle those negotiations in Spanish. That language is part of what is perhaps the most unusual background any general manager has ever had.

Luhnow, new to the Houston Astros, was born and raised in Mexico City, living there until he left for the University of Pennsylvania. He is not Mexican but American and therefore doesn‘t qualify as a minority general manager.

Luhnow was born in Mexico City because his father, an advertising executive with McCann Erickson, was transferred there and stayed. When it was time for college, Luhnow did not. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he took a dual major in economics and engineering. His next stop was Northwestern for an MBA.

Between his education and his entry into baseball, Luhnow worked for five years with a global management consulting firm, McKinsey and Company, becoming associate principal. Another stop on his path to baseball was Petstore.com, where he was general manager and vice president of marketing.

Luhnow also founded Archetype Solutions, Inc., where he served as president and chief operating officer

Lest anyone think none of this had anything to do with baseball, follow the dots. Luhnow said he recruited a fellow to work at McKinsey, they eventually left the company together, and the other fellow married one of the daughters of Bill DeWitt Jr., the Cardinals’ chairman. Through his friend, Luhnow met Bill DeWitt III, the team’s president.

“We hit it off right away,” Luhnow related.

Soon, in 2003, Luhnow was in baseball, working for the Cardinals as vice president for development. One of his assignments was developing methods to evaluate players. Assorted titles later, he was on his way to Houston.

COCAINE TESTING THAT WASN’T

Promoting his soon-to-be published autobiography, Oil Can Boyd said last week that he pitched two-thirds of his games under the influence of cocaine. Boyd pitched, mainly for the Boston Red Sox, in the 1980s, when cocaine was popular among players.

Boyd said in an interview with a Boston radio station that he was never tested for drug use, and I can believe that. Baseball management was not serious then about outlawing drugs, and that included a club owner who would go on to become commissioner. Still is, matter of fact.

The clubs and the players had a joint drug agreement aimed at recreational drugs. Steroids had yet to invade the game. But cocaine was big. Players used it, and few wound up facing disciplinary measures. Probably as many, including Keith Hernandez, Dale Berra and Lonnie Smith, wound up testifying in Federal District Court at the Pittsburgh drug trials in 1985.

The highlight was probably the disclosure that the Pirates’ parrot, the team’s mascot, was the delivery boy, carrying cocaine into the clubhouse for players who wanted it.

After the trials, one of the government prosecutors told me he regretted having given one well-known player immunity because prosecutors later learned that the player had smuggled cocaine into the country concealed in his baby’s diapers.

Before the trials Major League Baseball had its joint drug agreement but not for long. Either side had the right to terminate the agreement unilaterally, and the clubs did that during the 1985 World Series.

If they wanted to crack down on drugs, why did they kill the agreement? They didn’t like their role in it.

Unlike current steroids testing, which is done randomly and tests everybody, the drug testing of 1985 was done on a cause basis. Clubs had to turn in their own players if they thought the players were using drugs, and club officials didn’t want to be in that position.

Peter Ueberroth, then the commissioner, blatantly tried a direct approach, bypassing the union and going directly to the players to try to get them to agree to a different testing program, but they roundly rejected his effort.

That was just another matter that soured players against management. Collusion came shortly afterward.