It should come as no surprise that this is going to be one of the lowest rated World Series ever. Houston isn’t exactly a small market and most Texans are giddy, but the Astros hold zero attraction for most fans in other parts of the country. With the possible exception of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Colorado Rockies, the Astros are probably, 44 seasons after entering the National League as the Colts ’45s, the least known franchise in baseball.

Texas is pretty much regarded by the rest of the nation as football country, and to a great extent it is. But that’s largely the result of the TV era, which brought pro football to the state and made big time college football accessible to the masses. In the late 1970s, I joined the exodus of college graduates from Alabama and other southeastern states to the then booming economies of Houston and other Texas cities and found, much to my surprise, a thriving baseball culture that didn’t get much ink nationally or even in Texas.

There were still plenty of old-timers back then who remembered the great days of the Dixie League and lamented the deciding game of the 1931 league series between the Houston Buffs and Birmingham Barons, in which a trash talking, string bean named Dizzie Dean lost 1-0 to a 43-year-old career minor leaguer named Ray Cauldwell.

The old-timers would insist that the Texas and Southern leagues together had enough talent to stock an entire new major league, even if they didn’t include blacks and Mexicans. Anyway, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth had rich baseball histories long before Major League Baseball realized that it had leapfrogged to the West Coast and bypassed the half of the continent between the Mississippi River and the Nevada desert.

At the time, many baseball purists of my acquaintance would drop into town, take in a game, and leave mocking the Astrodome, but that was because they didn’t have to live in Houston. They didn’t have to put up with the withering heat, unrelenting humidity, infernal hummingbird sized mosquitoes, and absurd, unpredictable lightning storms that came out of nowhere to wipe out games in the third inning. The Astrodome changed all that; for the first time, local fans knew that when they made plans to attend a baseball game, there definitely would be a game.

Purists hated the Astroturf – I think it was Tug McGraw who cracked that someone needed to invent “Astro water” to counteract it – but like the dome, it was a necessary evil when the grass died after the skylight panels in the roof were painted over to keep fielders from losing fly balls in the glare. Curiously, critics never seemed to notice that the Dome’s dimensions and odd air currents kept baseballs from carrying and dramatically cut down hitters’ power stats, making Astros baseball a throwback to the days of bunting, stealing, making contact, and hitting behind runners – all those boring things which come under the heading of “small ball” and which the Chicago White Sox are touted for reviving this year.

The baseball world never took much note of the Astros, regarding them as a drab, colorless team with little personality. The baseball world was wrong. In eight seasons from 1979 through 1986, the Astros fielded some of the game’s best players, played some of the most exciting baseball, and produced more genuine tragedy than the Boston Red Sox did in half a century.

In 1979, my first full season in Houston, I got hooked on the first bona fide pennant race I’d ever witnessed up close. The Astros blew a 13-game lead in mid-July to the Cincinnati Reds and missed the NL West title by a single game – fitting punishment, said the old guys in the cheap seats in faded Texas League hats, for having trad ed away the league’s best player, Joe Morgan, eight years earlier.

The following season, the ‘Stros beat the Dodgers in one game for the western division and lost to the Phillies 3 Games to 2 in the most exciting playoff series I’ve ever seen. The last four games went into extra innings, and in the end, the Phillies outscored the Astros by one run, 20-19, to take the pennant. Watching Jose Cruz sit alone in the dugout, staring unblinkingly straight ahead as the crowd cleared, is one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen in baseball.

1980 should have been the year the Astros won it all. You’ve heard stories about how great J.R. Richard was at this best, but believe me, the stories don’t do him justice. Richard was 10-4 with an 1.89 ERA midway through the year when a sudden stroke ended his career. Having won no fewer than 18 games from 1976 through 1979, Richard was on the verge of leading the league in strikeouts for the third consecutive season in 1980. He was 6-foot-8 and his three quarters sidearm fastball sometimes made it to 100 mph. Imagine a right-handed Randy Johnson with 30 pounds of muscle, and you’ll get an idea how terrifying he was.

By 1984, I had left Houston but continued to follow the Astros’ fortunes – or lack of them. The year before, an iconoclastic blowhard named Bill James outraged millions of fans by suggesting that the Astros’ Dickie Thon was the best shortstop in the league – better even than Ozzie Smith. Given that Thon was a terrific fielder and had hit 20 home runs and stolen 34 bases in ’83, that shouldn’t have been such a shocking statement; indeed, if Thon had played ball anywhere but Houston, he would have been recognized as the best before James noticed it.

In 1984 Mike Torrez, then pitching for the Mets, beaned Thon with a fastball, and though he would play parts of nine more big league seasons, Dickie’s career, which seemed on the fast track to the Hall of Fame, never rebounded.

In 1986, living in Brooklyn, I was torn between the Astros and the Mets for the NL pennant. My divided loyalties were probably the reason the Astros lost the last two games in extra innings in the second most exciting playoff series I’ve ever seen. Tim Mc-Carver called the last game an epic on a par with Beowulf; I’m not sure what he was groping for, but to the old Texas League vets back in the Astrodome, it was more like Paradise Lost.

The Astros will win this year no matter what has happened by the time you read this. Having survived Albert Pujols’s home run, they’re prepared to overcome anything. I just hope some of the old Texas League are still around to see it.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”