Real-Life All-Decade Awards Winners
A big part of this project has been determining which players would have won the major league-wide awards in each hypothetical season of the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League. For this exercise, I use the Polarity of each player’s Zodiac sign (Positive or Negative) as opposed to the League of their real-life teams (American or National). But recently I got to thinking about how the astrological signs are represented among players who have won the real-life versions of these awards. And with a decade of full FABL seasons now in the books, I thought this would be a good time to do another retrospective.
Below is a chart showing the signs of MLB’s major awards from 2010 to 2019. For reference, these awards are Most Valuable Player (MVP), Cy Young Award (CYA), Rookie of the Year (RoY), and Rolaids Reliever/Mariano Rivera/Trevor Hoffman Award/Whatever you want to call it (RR). Since we’re looking at a ten-year period, with one award for each of MLB’s two leagues, there are a total of 20 winners per award. The results… probably won’t shock you.
I’ll start with pitchers, since a pitcher was the highest scoring fantasy player for each year in the 2010’s except for one – Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown winning 2012. Another reason to start with pitchers is that each pitching award was dominated by a particular sign. I wrote about how Pisces has absolutely owned the Negative Polarity Cy Young Award in the last post, so it’s no surprise that they also had the most MLB CYA’s in this time period. It’s interesting to note that the Fish’s six victories came from just three players: Clayton Kershaw had three wins, Justin Verlander had two (including when each won the award for their respective real-life leagues in 2011), and Jake Arrieta got the last one.
On the relief pitching side, it was Aries who had the most wins, also with six. This includes two years when Aries relievers won the award in both MLB leagues: Edwin Diaz and Josh Hader in 2018, and Jose Valverde and John Axford in 2011. Hader is the only Aries pitcher to receive the award twice: he followed up his ’18 win with one the following year. After Aries, Gemini is next with four total wins: three from Craig Kimbrel and one from Andrew Miller.
The distribution of MVP and RoY awards is much more even, with no sign winning more than three times in either award. In fact, three signs each have three wins in both of these categories. For the more prestigious of the two (MVP, in case you were wondering), the three signs are Aries (Miguel Cabrera twice and Buster Posey once), Libra (Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, and Andrew McCutchen), and Leo (Mike Trout all three times). The three signs with three Rookies of the Year are Taurus (Aaron Judge, Corey Seager, and Neftali Feliz), Sagittarius (Pete Alonso, Ronald Acuna Jr., and Wil Myers), and Cancer (Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, and Cody Bellinger. In fact, if you count Kyle Lewis’s win in 2020, Cancer has a Rookie of the Year in each of the last four seasons).
It seems unfair to count awards for one-inning-per-game relief pitchers on the same level as ones for position players or starting pitchers, but it’s worth noting that Aries had the most award wins overall in this time period with 14. Pisces was next up with 10, including one MVP award each from Kershaw and Verlander in years when they also won the CYA. Overall, all 12 signs have at least one win of one of these four awards in the last decade, with Jose Abreu’s Rookie of the Year in 2014 the only one for Aquarius.