Welcome to Astrology Baseball
Since almost the beginning of recorded history, humans have looked to the stars for guidance. From tropical to sidereal, from the ancient Babylonians to modern-day hipsters, astrology has thrived throughout the years. People use it for everything from predicting what’s going to happen to them in a given day to finding out deeper truths about themselves. But how does this particular pseudo-science work in conjunction with North American professional sports leagues?
Before we dive into that question, let’s establish what kind of astrology we’ll be focusing on here. Sun-sign astrology basically organizes people into groups depending on when and where they were born, placing each person into one of the 12 signs of the zodiac. There are other signs (moon sign and rising sign, to be specific), but we’re sticking with the most basic concept here. These 12 signs can be divided three different ways: by polarity (positive/negative), by essence (cardinal/fixed/mutable), and by element (air/earth/fire/water). These different qualities, along with the starting birth dates commonly associated with each sign, are all shown in the chart below.
I’ve been examining the relationship between Major League Baseball stats and sun sign astrology for nearly the past decade. 2012 was the first year where I thought to construct fantasy baseball lineups based on players’ astrological signs (organized into divisions, see below) and pit them against each other in year long matchup, and I’ve continued doing that to this day. The end results of that project are not very reliable, however, since I act as both the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League commissioner AND owner for all 12 teams, and the amount of attention I pay to roster changes and scheduling varied from year to year. That said, I blogged about the process sporadically on my old site, thoughtsaboutbaseball.com if you want to take a look back.
In particular, for 2020, the most unique and unprecedented MLB season of all time, I did not make a single change to any team’s lineups after setting them based on MLB.com’s pre-pandemic rankings back in March. With everything going on in the world, I found it more difficult to focus on updating a faux fantasy baseball site than I might have in recent years. Instead, I satisfied my inner compulsion for list-making by looking back through baseball’s history and making some pretty comprehensive databases, featuring retrospective fantasy lineups for each sign for the last 50 years.
Each of these databases include 17 players per sign, per year: one position player for each spot on the diamond plus DH, five starting pitchers, and three relievers. I should add that these 17 players do not always perfectly represent the fielding positions, because sometimes I will bend the rules of positional eligibility in the interest of getting the best players in the lineups. Then, by adding up the yearly fantasy point totals of these 17 players, I have a nice, clean number to approximate the skill level of any given sign in any given year.
As for the fantasy point system I use, it’s one I first saw in the early 2000’s on a site called Small World Fantasy Baseball. It is based solely on counting stats, and thus does not take into account many of the new advanced metrics that we see these days, but it has the benefit of reducing a player’s entire statistical line to one nice, clean number - seeing a pattern here? Below is a breakdown of what each statistical category is worth in terms of fantasy points for both batters and pitchers:
Given that fantasy baseball is a game of weekly matchups, I know that compiling fantasy point totals over the course of a full season isn’t going to approximate the results of a fantasy league. But as long as the methodology is constant across all years, that should give us a pretty good baseline to compare the signs with one another.
So now that you have all the background information, we’re ready to get started! In the weeks ahead, I’ll start by recapping the 2020 season as a whole from a fantasy perspective. Then I’ll go sign-by-sign through the zodiac and point out some interesting facts about the sign itself and the top players from that sign. And after that, I’ll work backwards year by year, slowly building a picture of the whole fantasy astrology landscape of the last 30 years… and possibly beyond!
So join me on a celestially-inspired journey through the recent history of fantasy baseball! It’s a winning combination of pseudo-science and professional sports that you can only find at Astrology Baseball Dot Com!