MLB The Show 21 Default Rosters
The newest installment of the popular MLB The Show video game series came out a week ago today. Since then, I have logged several hours on MLB The Show 21, but none actually simulating an actual MLB game - except of course for the tutorial level it forces on you if you turn on the game before all the files are finished downloading. The rest of the time I’ve spent meticulously combing through the default rosters for each franchise and plugging each player’s rating and attributes into my 2021 MLB database. Nobody ever said being an astrology baseball blogger was supposed to be exciting.
The goal of this mind-numbing yet fun (for me) exercise is to aid me in my signature project of building full rosters - all the way down to the Double-A level - for all 12 Astrology Baseball signs. But it’s going to take me longer than a week to complete the necessary player movement and lineup construction, not to mention creating new custom uniforms, since I can’t import last year’s versions from MLB The Show 20. So in the meantime, I want to focus on the astrological implications for the 780 players on Major League rosters (30 teams times 26 players each).
Looking at the raw numbers, Leo has the most players on all big league rosters of any of the 12 signs with 81. That’s 16 more players than the average you would get if members of the signs were distributed evenly across the MLB teams (780/12 = 65). The two signs that came closest to this average are Cancer and Taurus, with 64 apiece. And bringing up the rear are Scorpio and Aquarius, with just 50 players each. You can’t tell me it’s not cosmically significant that the high and low points are almost exactly equidistant from the average.
Leo not only has the most players on MLB rosters, but also the highest aggregate rating totals, thanks partly to Mike Trout.
The cool part about baseball video games is that each player’s overall value is distilled down into a number on a 1-100 scale. Adding up the ratings of each sign’s rostered players gives you the middle column of the above chart. The results are pretty much what you’d expect: the signs with more players generally have the higher aggregate ratings totals. The only exception is with Gemini, which has one more player than Sagittarius (68 to 67), but a lower aggregate rating by 58 (4,995 to 5,053).
But where things really get fascinating is when you look at the average rating across all players of a given sign, the somewhat crazy third column. The difference between the sign with the highest average player rating and the lowest is just a hair over 2 points. For reference, those are my home sign of Cancer (75.5) and the sign that directly precedes it on the cosmic wheel, Gemini (73.46), respectively. So I guess if nothing else, this exercise has shown that the average rating of a player on an MLB roster is right around 74.5, if my astrological calculations are correct.
Of course, that number will skyrocket when you take the average of players on just the 12 astrology teams, but it will still be some time before those rosters are all completed. Until then, enjoy my continued trip back through FABL history with another big curse-breaking year, 2004.