2020 Astrology Baseball Recap

View the 2020 FABL Lineups Here!

2020 was a season unlike any other in Major League Baseball history. The COVID-19 pandemic reduced what’s usually a six-month marathon that plays host to millions of fans, into a two-month sprint played in empty stadiums. But despite these social distancing measures, we ended up getting a much larger playoff pool than usual, which is a little strange, since you’d think that MLB would have wanted to give more players the opportunity to stay safer at home with their families. I guess the idea is that they could mitigate the small sample size of the regular season by giving more teams a chance to win it all in the postseason? I’m not exactly sure about the logic of that, but that’s what we got.

The playoff pool was not similarly expanded for the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League, which, as a reminder if you missed my intro post, consists of 12 teams whose members are determined by their Astrological Sun Signs (i.e. birth dates and locations). By way of a little background on astrology, these 12 signs are divided into two polarities, Positive and Negative, which for our purposes will serve as Leagues. These polarities are further broken down into the four classical elements, or Divisions: Air and Fire in the Positive League, Earth and Water in the Negative League. Thus the playoff picture for the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League (or FABL, pronounced like fable) consists of four teams, the leaders of each division.

The result of the short 2020 season is that each team played only 37.037% of the games they would during a full-length season (60 games divided by the usual 162). Thus the following chart, which shows the fantasy point totals accrued by each astrology sign-based team is going to be just over a third of the point totals you would see during a normal season. As another reminder, these numbers are calculated by adding up the fantasy point totals of a representative lineup consisting of 17 players: one position player for each defensive spot on the diamond, a designated hitter, five starting pitchers, and three relievers.

We all know that 2020 was an unprecedented baseball season for many reasons: the short schedule, the empty stadiums, the expanded playoffs, the universal DH. But it was also unprecedented from an astrological standpoint as well. As background research for this blog, I calculated fantasy astrology lineups for the past ~50 years. And the one constant over those past five decades was that Aquarius consistently finished as one of the lowest-scoring signs of the zodiac. Sometimes they were in last place by a wide margin, sometimes they hovered around the lower portion of the league, but they were never close to the top… until 2020. It took a pandemic, but we’ve finally witnessed the dawning of the age of Aquarius in Fantasy Astrology Baseball.

I’ll go over the particulars of the Aquarius lineup in my next post about the Water Carriers, but suffice it to say, they have the player who would win the Positive League MVP award, if there was such a thing… which there now is, because I just invented it! It turns out that AQU first baseman Jose Abreu (scorer of 1,086 fantasy points and 18.1 points per game in 2020) won the real life American League MVP award, as he led his real-life team (the White Sox) to a defeat by my favorite real-life team (the Athletics) in the Wild Card series, and he’s also the highest-scoring offensive player in the positive division of the FABL league. The highest-scoring Positive pitcher – and also the highest-scoring fantasy player overall in 2020 – is the ace of the Gemini Twins Shane Bieber, with a whopping 1,276 points on the year and 106.3 points per game. It’s too bad the gem he pitched for his real-life Cleveland Indians in Game 1 of their Wild Card series didn’t help his team advance to the next round.

Here’s what Abreu looks like wearing a custom Aquarius uniform I made on MLB The Show 20 for PS4.

Over in the Negative League, there were actually three position players who outscored Abreu: Freddie Freeman (1,182 / 19.7) and Jose Ramirez (1,100 / 19.0), both of the Virgo Maidens, Trea Turner (1,095 / 18.6) of my home sign Cancer, and Marcell Ozuna (1,092 / 18.2) of the Scorpio Scorpions. I’m tempted to give Freeman and Ramirez co-MVP honors, since they both play for the same astrology team. But if you’re going strictly by the numbers, the first baseman has the slight edge over his corner infield mate. The clear favorite for the Negative League Cy Young Award has to be Capricorn Goats ace Trevor Bauer (1,055 / 95.5), who had the second-highest points-per-game average in the league, among players with more than three starts.

Here’s a blast from the past baseball awards question: who remembers the Rolaids Reliever award? This honor for the top closers in each league was re-branded in 2013 to be named after Mariano Rivera (for the AL) and Trevor Hoffman (for the NL). But that configuration doesn’t quite work for Astrology, since both Hall of Famers are Positive Signs (Mo is a Sagittarius while Hoff is a Libra). In any case, another Aquarius is the clear favorite for the Positive League version of whatever this award should be called: Liam Hendriks, who put up positively Eckserlsey-ian numbers with 851 points and 35.5 PPG. The Negative League winner of this award gives me an excuse to talk about the rare instance where a player can “change” astrological signs. For years, based on the incomplete system of determining the dates for each sign, I had Brad Hand (807 / 35.1) misidentified as an Aries Ram, although his birthday of March 20 actually falls on the Pisces Fish side of the cusp by less than one day.

Shane Bieber was a couple paragraphs ago, but the overall 2020 fantasy point leader deserves a screenshot in his MLB The Show 20 custom Gemini uniform.

The Rookies of the Year of the respective FABL leagues are both centerfielders with nearly identical fantasy seasons. Kyle Lewis (699 / 12.1) of the real-life Mariners has a 27-point advantage on the season, but an edge of just 0.1 points-per-game over the newly-extended White Sox rookie Luis Robert (672 / 12.0). What’s even more interesting is that Lewis and Robert play for adjacent signs: Cancer and Leo, respectively, are the fourth and fifth signs of the zodiac, counting chronologically forward from Aries, which I learned always starts on the Spring Equinox. So that makes it even more dumb that I mis-assigned Brad Hand…

That just about does it for the top players of the 2020 Fantasy Astrology Baseball League, a season like no other in FABL history. Next, I’ll go through a team-by-team evaluation, with a post for each sign, in descending order from most 2020 fantasy points to least. Then, after a quick look at a possible retrospective 2020 FABL playoff bracket, I’ll start the journey backwards through time of Fantasy Astrology Baseball through the years.