All-Time 2010 through 2020
With my last yearly recap of the 2000 season, I reached a significant milestone: 20 full years of Fantasy Astrology Baseball League history! As a reminder, you can view lineups for each astrology team for all 20 of those years in the Gallery section. But before pushing my year-by-year analysis back into the 20th century, I decided to take a break and shift my focus to look at players’ career statistics rather than single season performance.
To accomplish this goal, I plugged every player who was a starter (or an honorable mention) on a FABL team into a new database, and calculated fantasy point totals for their entire careers. Adding an additional column for how many years each player appeared in the majors allowed me to calculate not just points-per-game, but also points-per-season. This latter category is easily skewed by cups of coffee, injuries, and the COVID-shortened 2020 season, but it’s an additional point of reference.
What follows is a list of the top players, as measured by career fantasy points. I haven’t finished calculating stats for both decades in question, so this post will only include Fantasy Astrology starters from 2010 to 2020. But by this time next week, I will have gotten all the way back to the year 2000 – just in time for an in-depth look at the all 2000’s lineup for each sign of the zodiac. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Only two players in the last decade eclipsed 40,000 career fantasy points, and they each also broke the 45,000-point plateau. I featured the overall leader, Leo Alex Rodriguez, in my recap of the 2007 season, when he scored the then-highest single season point total that we had seen so far (going reverse-chronologically). A-Rod split his career almost evenly between shortstop (Seattle/Texas) and third base (Yankees), while number two overall scorer, Capricorn Albert Pujols, has a much more lopsided split between first base (Cardinals/Angels) and designated hitter (only the Angels). The featured player in my post about 2009, Pujols is still active, if recently released and re-signed, so there’s a chance that he closes the 1,435 point gap between the two players (as of the end of 2020).
Next on the list is Hall of Fame Braves third baseman Chipper Jones, also the top Taurus player who appeared in the last decade. Chipper just missed the 20% cutoff to have corner outfield listed as his secondary position: his 364 games split between left and right field only make up 14.6% of his career games. I already wrote about Derek Jeter in my post about the most recent Hall of Fame inductees, and if he’s not the best Cancer Crabs shortstop of all time, he at least holds that title for the last two decades. I’ll skip over Carlos Beltran for now, since we already have a Taurus on the list… except to wonder whether his already slim Hall of Fame chances have been officially torpedoed by his involvement in the Astros 2017 sign-stealing scandal.
The next two players on the list are both Aries third basemen: Adrian Beltre and Miguel Cabrera were separated by just over 300 total points as of the start of the season, but Miggy is less than 100 points away from moving up a spot on the all-time leaderboard. Featured in my post about 2012, Cabrera is in a similar situation to Chipper Jones as far as adding outfield eligibility to the two corner infield spots. On the other side of the defensive spectrum, Scorpio DH David Ortiz doesn’t technically qualify for ANY fielding positions, with just over 11% of his career appearances coming at first base.
Even given the inflated value of saves in fantasy points, it’s a bit surprising to see Sagittarius closer Mariano Rivera slotting in as the highest-scoring pitcher of any kind in the last decade. But keep in mind, Mo is quite arguably the greatest relief pitcher of all time, as I mentioned in my recap of the 2005 season. Right fielders occupy the tenth and eleventh spots on the list: Pisces lefty Bobby Abreu and Aquarius righty Vladimir Guerrero, whose son Vlad Jr. is the current Pisces starting first baseman.
After another Scorpio left-handed hitter (outfielder Johnny Damon), we get the first two starting pitchers on the list: Pisces righty Justin Verlander and Cancer lefty CC Sabathia. As of the end of 2020, these two venerated hurlers were separated by just 20 fantasy points, but provided Verlander returns from Tommy John surgery next season, he’s all but guaranteed to widen the gap. We have to step below the 30,000-point plateau to see the decade’s top catcher and second baseman: Ivan Rodriguez (Sagittarius) and Robinson Cano (Libra), at 15th and 18t place, respectively.
Next time I’ll go back to the current campaign, with an injury report as of Gemini season 2021. But next Sunday, I’ll start a sign-by-sign look at the top career players of the 2000’s so far.