FABL 2021 Season End
Another Fantasy Astrology Baseball League season is now in the books, with the Taurus Bulls emerging as champions for the first time since I’ve been running this project. It was an exhilarating finals matchup between two underdog teams, with plenty of dramatic twists and turns and lead changes, but in the end, Taurus defeated Libra by a rather decisive 2,161 to 1,738 fantasy point margin. And I find it fitting that two Taurus hitters had key moments to secure their real-life teams’ playoff hopes in Game 162: Alex Verdugo had a game-tying double against the Nationals, while Aaron Judge delivered the walk-off single for the Yankees.
But the end of the regular season is just the beginning of the fun, for an obsessive list maker like myself. Now that I’m free of the tedium of weekly lineup tinkering and monthly roster updates, I can take a step back and look at 2021 season from a broader perspective. Because, there are three distinct methods of Astrology Baseball analysis, and my personal favorite method can’t get started until we have a full season’s worth of statistics. Why is it my favorite, you ask? Because it allows us to lay the groundwork for an offseason tournament in the mold of the World Baseball Classic, but using astrological signs in place of countries of origin.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: Method One of the above-mentioned three takes place during the fantasy season, like the one that just concluded. It takes the form of a 12-team fantasy league, but instead of a draft or auction, the rosters are determined by the players’ birth dates, with one team for each sign of the zodiac. These teams play each other in weekly matchups determined by fantasy point totals, with the leaders of the four divisions advancing to the final four tournament. This takes place during the last month of the MLB regular season, where matchups expand to two-weeks each, and by the time the real-life playoffs start, a fantasy champion is crowned. I know you know all this, but it feels good to type out the particulars every now and then.
Method One not only requires paying attention during the regular season, but it also involves quite a bit of foresight and luck. The league manager (i.e., me) has to decide which players to put in each sign’s starting lineup, based on a combination of recent results and gut feeling as to who are most likely to have strong future performances. Then there’s scouring the waiver wire to keep track of the unexpectedly strong players who didn’t make their signs’ season opening rosters, which I build using preseason rankings. These can be daunting tasks for the owner of a single fantasy team, let alone someone who has to manage 12 of them.
That’s why I prefer Method Two, which starts with calculating fantasy points for all the relevant players in the league (which, for me, boils down to at least 200 plate appearances or 40 innings pitched). After that, I simply populate the lineups of each sign with the top-scoring player at each position (or, who can be reasonably expected to play each position – I’m extremely open to bending eligibility rules in the interest of getting the best players in the lineup). That way, there’s no guesswork or bias, because all the points are already accounted for. These are the lineups that appear in the Gallery section.
While the timing differs, Methods One and Two are similar in that they both require the real-life MLB season to play out, with the results determining the success of the different signs. In fact, it was only after spending a full MLB season blogging exclusively about Fantasy Astrology Baseball, that I arrived at the insight I shared above about how to best make use of the lineups generated by Method Two. These retroactive lineups could be used to determine seeding in a hypothetical offseason “Astrology Baseball Classic” event. This could be as minimal as inviting players from the four division leading signs to compete in a final four-style tournament. Or we could expand the field to the entire zodiac and use a 12-team double elimination bracket… or if we really wanted to go all out, it could be a round robin setup.
I’m sure it would be hard to convince any real-life players to suit up with their astrological sign-mates for exhibition matchups, but luckily, the same players’ avatars in a video game don’t have a choice. That brings us to Method Three: a simulation where members of each sign actually play together on the same roster. I actually began such a simulation earlier in the season, using MLB The Show 21 on my PS4. However, two things conspired to cause me to prematurely stop this project. If I was going to pay attention to something the length of a full MLB season, I want it to be the actual, real-life MLB season. And whenever I watched a simulated game, all I really wanted to do was play the game. That led to my Road to the Show character of Krys Regnom, who didn’t reach the big leagues until 2023 in The Show-time, but that was largely because I didn’t understand how to level up properly…
All this to say that I might return to this simulation now that the real season is over. But there’s a lot that can happen between now and the end of the real-life playoffs, which I will be following and providing astrology-related commentary and analysis.