2006 Astrology Awards Recap
View the 2006 FABL Lineups Here!
After finishing second to Pisces in a virtual dead heat for the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League point title in 2007, the Taurus Bulls earned the top spot by a fairly healthy margin in 2006. Wait… Taurus won the league the year BEFORE finishing second to Pisces in a virtual dead heat… I always forget we’re going REVERSE chronologically. 2006 marks the last time an Earth sign scored the most points in the league. Taurus accomplished this feat without a single major award winner, although their offense did have some impressive pieces in Carlos Beltran (2,711 points / 19.4 points-per-game), Andruw Jones (2,417 / 15.5), and Justin Morneau (2,469 / 15.7) in a year when he won the real-life American League MVP). Also their pitching staff reached historic heights, but more on that later.
Naming the Negative Polarity MVP is easy, as Capricorn first baseman Albert Pujols (3,003 / 21.0) rode his league-leading 1.102 OPS to become another entry into the 3,000-point club (see my last post). Negative batters also had three of the next four spots, so let’s go over them individually. Two left-handed Scorpio sluggers are next - Ryan Howard (2,924 / 18.4, good for the National League MVP) and David Ortiz (2,887 / 19.1) - giving the Scorpions the best first base/DH duo in the game. Ranking fifth overall is Pujols’s sign-mate, second baseman-turned-outfielder Alfonso Soriano (2,778 / 17.5), who became the founding member of the 40-40-40 club (that’s homers-steals-doubles) in his lone season with the Nationals. The best Positive Polarity player lands outside the top five, with Gemini Jose Reyes (2,770 / 18.1) checking in at #6 overall.
If you were keeping track of the top 5 overall point scorers from the last paragraph, you’d know there was one missing, and that the last one had to be a Negative Polarity pitcher. That honor goes to Pisces Johan Santana (2,835 / 83.4), who easily won the Cy Young Award in both the AL and the NP. In case you were wondering whether the offensive explosion of 2007 was an outlier or part of a trend, consider that Santana was one of only three pitchers in the top 40 overall point scorers in 2006.
You don’t get a Positive Polarity pitcher until Carlos Zambrano (2,020 / 61.2) at #71, but don’t let his low ranking overshadow the fact that Gemini has won three PP CYA’s in a row (at least - it could continue further back), with Jake Peavy and Tim Lincecum following in Zambrano’s footsteps. One thing to mention is that there were only six pitchers between Zambrano and Santana. Of those six, four were Tauruses: Brandon Webb, Chris Carpenter, John Smoltz, and Roy Halladay. And then right after Zambrano, we have Aaron Harang, who with 2,008 points gives the Bulls an all-2,000 point starting rotation, something we’ve never seen before in FABL history!
The top rookie in baseball in 2006 was Hanley Ramirez (2,437 / 15.4), who won the Rookie of the Year award in both the NL and the NP. When you combine his production with Pujols, Soriano, and Matt Holliday, you can see why Capricorn was such a close competitor with Taurus in the Earth division. The PP RoY goes to Ryan Zimmerman (2,110 / 13.4) of Libra, which makes a streak of (at least) three years in a row, followed by Troy Tulowitzki in ’07, and Evan Longoria in ’08 (shared with Aquarian Geovany Soto).
With Francisco Rodriguez (2,274 / 33.0) winning the NP’s Reliable Reliever award (to go along with his real-life Rolaids Reliever trophy in the AL), Capricorn takes home three of the four major awards for the Negative Polarity. The top PP reliever goes to Joe Nathan (2,210 / 34.5), which means both RR winners would win the award again within the next three years: K-Rod took home the crown thanks to his historic 2008 season, where he set the single season saves record, while Nathan’s second win came one year after that in 2009.
2006 was the first of two years where a steroid-aided Barry Bonds reached a major home run milestone, which I thought would be a good opportunity to track all-time home run totals across the 12 astrological signs. Tune in next time for the results!