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Whoever heard of lining up teams by their mascot names alphabetically ... grumble, grumble.  And could swear this is the first time I ever saw James do that.  The one time I cared.  mumble, crumble.  But here's to Diderot!

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James' method is to assign each year's team a "strength score," like this one he has on the Astros:

All of us -- and by "all of us" I mean SABRMatt, naturally -- could take a yellow pad and make a long list of + and - for this method.  If you have your own laboratory, go to it.  One of the strengths here is that with the gentle "Up cycle, Down cycle" turning points, you've got a lot of reliability.  A lot of data and a macro point of view.  

After he has 30 teams, will James get to attaching things to each turning point -- a Top 50 SuperDuperStar or a change of owners or whatever -- those "Seismic Events" will correlate well with franchise health going forward.  Good approach here.  Or so it seems to me.

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HOUSTON ASTROS

They had some similarity to the M's:  

• Juuuuuuust a bit more recent than, say, the Philadelphia A's
• Way, WAYYYYY underneath New York's radar scope (my own thought)
• A lot of failure after expansion
• Some epically poor GM'ing in their first 25 years - Cuellar to the O's for zip, Joe Morgan to the Reds for zip, "donated" John Mayberry to the Royals, etc etc
• A good taste of success for 10-15 years (late 80's thru early 00's) due to Stars & Scrubs ... Mike Scott, Nolan Ryan, Roy Oswalt, Bagwell and Biggio, etc
• Another (surprising) valley in 2007-14, being made fun of a lot for weird stuff because they were bad
• 2015-17 and forward Jose Altuve years

So it's a stimulating comparison to the M's.  Using our own verbiage rather than pull quotes, since talking points themselves aren't copyright territory.  We'll just continually remind you that $3/month isn't even subscription money unless you're putting yourself through college on a Denny's paycheck like some of us did.  Let's take a glance at James' suggestions for the causes of the turning points:

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MARINERS CYCLES

Here's a first cut, done with 60 seconds thought - in other words, 3 or 4 times as much thought as you usually get from Dr. D.

(3) At first glance we can compare Ken Griffey Jr's arrival in 1989-90 to any of the Astros' three UP cycles.  In fact the 1995-2005 Astros remind us a whale of a lot of the 00's M's.  That's one era, unless you cut 1990-2003 or so into two eras, up and more up.  So a third of the M's history was an asterisked UP, in part due to getting lucky on Junior and the Unit.  Also in 1989 the Mariners were bought by Jeff Smulyan, the first M's owner who liked to win.

(1) The M's first cycle ever is that another DOWN cycle, sinking to even lower depths than pure expansion rosters?

(2) 1984, I wonder if that's going to start a moderate UP cycle, with Mark Langston and Alvin Davis arriving.  Would 1984-2002 consist of three eras, lightly UP, moderately UP and way UP?

(4) 2005-15, mostly the Zduriencik would be a frustrating DWN cycle as such and my first factor would be GM'ing by committee.  That entails a lot.

(5) 2016ff will be the Dipoto era.  James says that nothing is an "era" until you have at least 5 years; you need that to even begin to understand whether an org started showing blessedness.  Or cursedness.

Cheers,

Dr D