HOUSTON — You couldn’t help but be touched by what you saw.

There stood Lance McLean, a high school football player turned cancer patient, sharing the story of his battle, his mom seated up-front, friends in the back, everyone inspired Wednesday morning at Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers as Major League Baseball and the Astros used the platform of the World Series to announce the plans for a dedicated waiting space for teenagers undergoing treatment here. It served as the textbook example for how professional sports and their teams should leverage their brands.

Alas, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you couldn’t help but be struck by the irony, either. By the reality.

For all the good the Astros can do in their community, for all the brilliance they display on the Minute Maid Park field, a chain pulls only as strong as its weakest link. And the Astros have inflicted serious damage on themselves, on their better angels and on MLB altogether with their conduct of the past week regarding the Brandon Taubman matter.

“I think what’s interesting is when you have an organization, like any major league team, you really have 250 players. You’ve got hundreds of staffers,” Reid Ryan, Houston’s president of business operations, told The Post at the hospital. “You have thousands of part-time employees. And it only takes one instance for somebody to do something that folks see negatively and that can wash away lots of positives.”

Folks saw Taubman’s actions negatively for a mighty good reason. As first reported by Sports Illustrated, Taubman, the Astros’ assistant general manager, repeatedly shouted, “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so f–king glad we got Osuna!” late Saturday night, shortly after Houston eliminated the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, while looking at three female reporters, one of whom wears a purple bracelet recognizing domestic violence and had often tweeted out the phone number for women’s services when closer Roberto Osuna — who served a 75-game suspension last year for violating baseball’s domestic-violence rules — took the mound for the Astros last year. It’s widely believed Taubman was targeting this woman.

On Wednesday, MLB investigators interviewed witnesses to the incident, and commissioner Rob Manfred said he hopes to decide on discipline as swiftly as possible. Taubman faces a likely significant suspension from MLB, and his job with the Astros could be in jeopardy, as well. The Astros, moreover, should be fined heavily for their execrable attempt to smear the Sports Illustrated reporter who first broke the story and for their overall failure to be accountable for their employee’s actions, although Manfred insisted his focus was on Taubman’s actions and not the aftermath.

MLB officials are livid that their jewel event has been upstaged by this terrible episode and the Astros’ utter failure at managing it, with no end in sight. On Wednesday, Houston president of baseball operations and general manager Jeff Luhnow spoke with SportsTalk790, a local radio station, and equivocated: “What we really don’t know is the intent behind the inappropriate comments [Taubman] made. We may never know that, because the person who said them and the people who heard them, at least up to this point, have different perspectives.”

Ay yi yi. The Astros’ defiance can work very well when, say, signing an off-the-radar free agent. Far less so when discussing an important social issue. If not for manager A.J. Hinch’s admirable smackdown of Taubman on Tuesday, the franchise would be in even worse shape.

Astros owner Jim Crane, who has stayed silent besides boasting in a statement about the team’s commitment to stopping domestic violence, must grasp the holistic view of it all. As fantastic as it is that the Astros help teens with cancer, will they turn on such a patient, particularly a young woman, who grows up to be a sports journalist and gets verbally targeted by a team executive?

Ryan, who was not directly involved with the Taubman incident, said, “Hopefully, at the end of the day, the Astros and our industry will learn from everything that’s happened in the past.”

For sure, the Astros have some serious catching up to do. Until they do, they’re hurting everyone in their orbit.