Astrology Baseball: Water Signs Bracket

Just a little over a week until the first Spring Training games start, and we've still got three brackets left to go!  Let's jump in to my personal bracket: the Water Signs.  First, the Bracket:

Notice that these signs correspond to more muted, cooler colors as opposed to the brighter, flashier ones of the air signs.  I wonder if that has anything to do with the personal qualities of the players represented on these particular lineups.  Although these three teams are grouped around the middle of the pack in terms of total points, this bracket includes both MVPs and both Cy Young Award winners from 2011.

CANCER CRABS

Obviously a big frontline starter in CC Sabathia, and a solid SP2 in former "Big Three" member Tim Hudson.  Although he's hardly the MVP candidate he once was, Derek Jeter probably has the most pure star power of anyone on this team (or of anyone in Baseball, for that matter).  The offense is led by a pair of infielders from the NL Central: Aramis Ramirez (late of the Cubs, newly to the Brewers) and Brandon Phillips, the Cincinnati Cardinal-Hater - both of whom lead the bracket at their respective positions.  The team's next highest offensive point-scorer is second on the depth chart at 2B: Howie Kendrick.  My current version of the lineup has him playing his secondary position, 1B, which pushes Adam Lind to the bench.  The Cancer team has two All-Star caliber catchers in Yadier Molina and Miguel Montero, who occupy the C and DH positions respectively.

The rest of this team is marked with inconsistency.  The rotation includes comeback whiz-kid Ryan Vogelsong and mostly-retired workhorse Javier Vazquez: one unproven, the other imminently on his way out.  Their 5th starter (best among all 5th starters in the bracket) is one Jaime Garcia, who shares the same birthday and date with your humble narrator.  Look out for this rotation in a couple years when Stephen Strasburg joins the pack full time.  The corner outfield is made up of aging veteran Torii Hunter and injury prone slugger Nelson Cruz - Shin-Soo Choo would have been in this mix as well, were it not for his own injury-plagued 2011 season.  The bullpen is full of young stars on the rise: current closers Sergio Santos and Chris Perez, future closer Jim Johnson, and don't-call-me-a-closer Jason Motte.

SCORPIO SCORPIONS

I was trying to think of a better word than "fearsome" to describe a lineup that includes (contested, drug-using) NL MVP Ryan Braun, Ryan Howard, David Ortiz, and Mike Napoli - but I think fearsome pretty much says it all.  And the offense doesn't even stop there: Scorpio also has speedy leadoff man Coco Crisp, breakout All-Star Asdrubal Cabrera, and powerhouse in waiting Mike Stanton.  And how about Nick Markakis and Johnny Damon as your 4th and 5th outfielders?  Almost makes you forget Martin Prado and Marco Scutaro playing their secondary positions of 3B and 2B respectively.  But if any of the infielders falter, there's Yunel Escobar and Darwin Barney with some solid defense in the wings.

On the mound, they've got a pair of All-Star lefty starters in C.J. Wilson and Ricky Romero.  But after those two, it's pray for rain... and for big leads.  Matt Garza is a decent SP3, but R.A. Dickey and Mike Leake are both worst in the bracket by a pretty wide margin.  The bullpen features two 2011 Rookie closers from SoCal teams: Jordan Walden and Javy Guerra.  They're not the only two 2011 Rookies in the bullpen grouped together geographically: setup men Greg Holland and (All-Star) Aaron Crow both pitch for Kansas City.  It's a good thing Joe Nathan is in there to give some guidance to all the youngsters.

PISCES FISH

As fearsome as the Scorpio lineup may have been, nothing compares to the Pisces pitching staff.  They somehow have both the 2011 Cy Young Award winners in the top two spots of their rotation: Justin Verlander (also the MVP) for the AL and Clayton Kershaw for the NL... and what's more, they come at hitters from different sides of the mound!  And that's not all: the rest of their rotation - Yovani Gallardo, Daniel Hudson, and Anibal Sanchez - are all No. 2 starters for their respective teams.  Star closer J.J. Putz leads a bullpen that includes newly-converted closer Brandon League, Brian Wilson (watch out for him when his health/beard returns), and Jonny Venters, perhaps the best lefty setup man in the game right now.  Of the whole pitching staff, only Sanchez does not lead the bracket: he's second to that dude from the Cardinals who shares my birthday.

The offense is short on potent weapons at the plate: Curtis Granderson would be awesome to have if he was guaranteed to repeat his breakout 2011.  Brian McCann is one of the best catchers in the game right now and Paul Konerko is always solid at 1B.  Across the diamond, Kevin Youkilis can mash and take walks if only he could stay healthy.  Dan Uggla has some power at 2B, and he could be looking at a move to DH in the near future when Dustin Ackley comes into his own.  Right now I have primary DH Bobby Abreu playing in LF with No. 2 2B Kelly Johnson occupying the DH spot.  Stephen Drew and Denard Span would round out the lineup in a perfect world, but due to their injury-riddled seasons, Clint Barmes and Jon Jay are the highest point-scorers at SS and RF respectively.


COMING UP: Take a look at some of the most incendiary players in baseball with a look inside the Fire Bracket!

Astrology Baseball: Air Signs Bracket

First, a recap of this bracket:

If you start counting at the beginning of the calendar year, the first sign you'll come across is Aquarius. Despite it having "aqua" in the name, Aquarius is an Air sign.  If you continue counting, you'll see a pattern of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth signs, which repeats thrice, until you hit all 12 signs.  Thus it only makes sense to follow this pattern with my analysis (even though Aries is technically the "first" astrological sign of the Zodiac).  You'll notice, though, that inside each bracket I list the signs as they appear from Cardinal to Fixed to Mutable.  You'll also notice that in place of my customary lineups, I've included graphics of the sort you might expect to see promoting each team on TV were this a nationally televised game (except quite a bit less professional...), each one featuring a representation of what the team's cap might look like using the Zodiac symbol glyph.

LIBRA SCALES

According to my research, the colors associated with Libra are pastels - light blue, pink, yellow - so I picked the recently re-branded Rays to represent them.  Headlining this squad marked by decidedly un-intimidating colors are some of the most fearsome competitors in the sport today, including four starting All-Stars, three Silver Sluggers, the AL Cy Young runner up, and the guy who placed third in AL MVP voting.  Those last two fellas (occupying the top left and top right spots of the graphic) are Jered Weaver and Jose Bautista.  Robinson Cano and Troy Tulowitzki form one of the best (if not the best [see below]) middle infield combinations of the tournament.  Michael Young, who spent most of the 2011 season as DH for the Rangers, will man 1B for our purposes (we're not talking about a full season after all).  Carlos Gonzalez, Tulo's teammate on the Rockies, and Andrew McCutchen of the Pirates round out the rest of the outfield.  And the team wouldn't be complete without an actual member of the real life Rays: Evan Longoria at 3B.

You'll see the team's No. 2 starter, Matt Cain, on the graphic, and following him on the depth chart is Zack Greinke, who in typical Libra fashion, has overcome his anxiety disorder to such a degree that he's agreed to act as his own agent.  Closing games will be Heath Bell, newly signed by the newly moved Marlins, but if he falters, the Scales have a stacked bullpen behind him made up of closers Joel Hanrahan and Carlos Marmol, and soon-to-be-closer Kenley Jansen.  To give you an idea of where this team stands compared to its direct competition, all the players listed except Cano, Gonzalez, and Bell are tops at their positions in the bracket.  To give you an idea of this team's depth, they have a trio of very talented outfielders - Ichiro Suzuki, Drew Stubbs, and Seth Smith - competing for the DH spot.

AQUARIUS WATER-CARRIERS

As un-intimidating as are the colors for Libra, so is the name for Aquarius - the difference is, this team's lineup shares those characteristics.  This team is represented by the Mariners, whose color scheme most closely corresponds to the turquoise color associated with the sign.  The team's biggest offensive threat is Alex Gordon, and he had his only productive season in 2011 after following in the tradition of 3B prospects moving to LF when they can't really play 3B.  He's joined by All-Stars Lance Berkman, who rebounded nicely with the Cardinals after slumping the previous year, and Alex Avila, who wowed everyone in Detroit and justified using Victor Martinez primarily at DH.  Berkman moves back to 1B (as he will in real life) to open up a corner outfield spot for Josh Willingham.  Austin Jackson will play CF and lead off... which should give you an idea of how unimpressive the Aquarius squad looks.

I put Hiroki Kuroda on the graphic because, unlike the team's highest-scoring pitcher Doug Fister, Kuroda has proved he can sustain productivity over more than one season.  Johnny Cueto had a strong season and Jair Jurrjens has potential if he can avoid injury, but again, not very impressive.  If this were 2010, the story would be a little different, with the likes of Ubaldo Jimenez and Josh Johnson... but alas, a new year brings a new set of statistics.  Remember how Libra has three closers on the roster?  Well Aquarius doesn't even have one, entrusting the 9th inning to Tyler Clippard.

GEMINI TWINS

The consensus online was that Gemini is associated with the color yellow, so I matched them to the Pirates... although it was very hard to resist the temptation to just link them with the actual Twins and be done with it.  Remember the debate over the best middle infield combination?  Well Ian Kinsler and Jose Reyes definitely give the Libras a run for their money.  This combo almost didn't happen, since if Kinsler's birthday should classify him as a Cancer, but cusps are funny things, and Baseball Almanac classifies him as a Gemini.  Kinsler's unexpected arrival pushes Ben Zobrist to his secondary position of RF, which should make him no less effective with the bat.  On the infield corners are two players who didn't play those positions in 2011, but Jhonny Peralta played primarily 3B the two previous seasons and Carlos Lee is becoming better suited for 1B now anyway.

After two legitimate stars at SP1 and CL (Tim Lincecum and NL ROY Craig Kimbrel respectively), the pitching staff drops off dramatically.  Starters two thru five ranked last in their bracket, and although the bullpen does feature two additional closers, Fernando Salas is due to be replaced on the Cardinals by Jason Motte and Andrew Bailey found himself traded after struggling with injuries in 2011.  In years past, this offense would look much more impressive, featuring such fading stars as Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, and Travis Hafner, but put mildly, this Gemini team did not age particularly well.

Thoughts About Astrology and Baseball

So far the excitement surrounding the Super Bowl and the Republican Primaries and the Grammys and the impending storm of the Oscars has done very little to alleviate the length of the baseball off-season.  And with 50 days left until Opening Day, I need something more than just news of the latest transactions to occupy the baseball part of my brain.  Luckily I had the foresight to compile a gigantic database with all sorts of interesting sortable information about the players from the 2011 season.  One of the ways I can organize my database is by birthday, so I decided to see what would happen if I generated lineups based on the astrological signs of all the players!

I started paying attention to astrology when I heard this humorous song by "Weird Al" Yankovic and realized that the lyrics would be a good way to learn the signs and their order.  I don't follow horoscopes in the newspapers or even believe in the tenets of astrology per se (although I try to keep up to date on any interesting developments in the field), but I've taken it upon myself to learn a little bit more about it in the interest of providing my project with some context.  Each sign falls into one of four categories corresponding to the four Classical elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  The three signs from each elemental category have one of three qualities: Cardinal, Fixed, or Mutable.  Each sign is also either Positive (Fire and Air) or Negative (Earth and Water).

I thought the coolest way to organize this pursuit was to set up a series of hypothetical round robin tournaments, whereby the three signs from each element play against each other, with the four winners moving on to the next round.  It's not fully fleshed out yet, but I'm thinking of using some combination of the other astrological qualities and the sum total performance of the players on each "team" to determine the order of who plays whom in the tournament (this is important when we start taking the rotations of starting pitchers into account).  I've also assigned each astrological team to an actual major league team (in case I want to make this experiment an actuality using, for instance, a videogame interface).

Here's a graphical representation of how the project breaks down so far:

The Water Bracket appears to be the most evenly matched division with each team within a few thousand swp of the mean (64,152.9) and within a handful of players of the median in that column (86.5).  It's sad that Cancer is the weakest of the three teams, since that's my sign, but there's no reason to take this personal.  Aries looks like it's poised to run away with the Fire Bracket, which shows a clear decline from Cardinal to Fixed to Mutable (Sagittarius is the lowest scoring of all the teams).  The Libra team leads the league in player efficiency: they average 823.1 swp per player  (Aquarius is last with 579.9).  But the strongest team out of anybody without a doubt is Virgo with 22 more players and nearly 19,000 more points than its next competitor.  It's interesting that that would be the case for players born during the hottest part of both the year and the playoff race.

More detailed analysis to follow, including breakdowns of the best players on all the teams, the process by which I decided which real team should represent each astrological team, and some delightful matchup predictions.  Until then, keep watching the skiis...

Thoughts about LEGO Lord of the Rings...

When I got my first look at the upcoming LEGO Lord of the Rings sets this weekend, I was filled with equal parts excitement (for the hours of fun I'll get building and playing with them) and nervousness (for the hundreds of dollars I'll end up spending on them).  Then excitement took over for good when I thought of the impending possibility of a LEGO Lord of the Rings videogame coming down the pipeline.  I mean, LEGO has made successful games out of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter, even Pirates of the Caribbean... pretty much every property they've licensed that wasn't based on a videogame to begin with (that of course excludes Prince of Persia).

Now, an interesting question about these licensed LEGOs is whether they're based solely on the Oscar winning films, or whether they draw from the source material more directly?  This issue not only affects whether we'll get to see a Tom Bombadil LEGO set, but it also impacts the plot of this potential videogame.  Because, as much as I'm a fan of the movies, I definitely take issue with a few of the storytelling choices made by Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens - most notable among these is the complete deviation from Tolkien's character of Aragorn.  I'll explain this particular issue in detail below, and when I do, I hope I will get everyone hoping for a more faithful adaptation of the story in LEGO videogame form.

"I do not want that power. I have never wanted it."

This line is spoken by Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring movie when Arwen (haven't seen a minifig version of her yet) brings up the subject of his lineage.  For those of you who missed the movies, Aragorn is descended in direct line from Isildur, who took up his father Elendil's broken sword and used it to cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand.  It takes him three movies, but eventually Aragorn owns up to his role in the epic tale, reforges the Sword that was Broken, and takes his rightful place as the King of Gondor.

The story of the unwilling hero, imbued with some great innate talent, but who is unable to use it for whatever reason, is certainly recognizable enough in the line of epic storytelling.  Joseph Campbell describes it in depth, outlining the process whereby the potential-hero leaves the familiar world and goes on a journey of self-discovery in order to "return with the elixir" and activate the hero-potential.  Aragorn is certainly a hero in the midst of a Hero's Journey, but when we meet him in The Fellowship of the Ring, his journey is far advanced beyond the point of having any doubts about who he is, what power he has, or whether/how to use that power.

Aragorn's lineage carries with it more than just his inheritance, which is basically rulership over all the free lands of Middle Earth.  The fact that he's a descendant of kings means that the blood of a more ancient and powerful race of men runs through his veins.  Now, this isn't an issue of racism or eugenics; in Tolkien's world of fantasy and mythology, not all Men (or Elves) are created equal.  The very first and most  powerful humans (the Numenoreans) were taller, hardier, and longer-lived than the current species, their blood having been mingled with lesser men over the generations.  As a direct descendant, the blood of Numenor runs nearly true in Aragorn, which is evident in his advanced age: 87 years old, which is "no longer young even in the reckoning of Men of the Ancient Houses."

Perhaps Aragorn went through a period of doubt about his true potential, but if so, this liminal stage likely took place between age 20 and 25 - after Elrond revealed to him his true name and ancestry, but before his friendship with Gandalf.  All this is detailed in the extensive appendix to Return of the King (the book) and might potentially make good subject matter for a prequel to Aragorn's Quest (the Wii game).  Or maybe even another movie.  Lord knows Peter Jackson and Co. will need to come up with some more ideas before the intellectual property rights default to someone else.  But the point is, over his six decades of adventuring, the literary Aragorn has a fully-developed sense of who he is and what he will become.

Another way the Aragorn of the books honors his link with the past is his relationship with Elendil's broken sword, called Narsil.  This is Aragorn's heirloom, a symbol of both his lineage and his identity; so much so that when the Hobbits first meet Aragorn in the books, he carries the useless shards of Narsil with him rather than bear any other weapon.  He has the sword reforged in Rivendell (and renames it Andúril, Flame of the West) before the Fellowship sets out, and subsequently invokes the blade's ancient power at many points throughout their journey.  By contrast, in the movies he wields some random sword until the third movie when Elrond finally delivers Andúril to him.  Here I was assuming that Peter and Philippa made all these drastic changes to Aragorn's character so the audience could see him make the choice to become king... but then he doesn't even make the choice at all! His birthright LITERALLY falls into his lap.

The Lord of the Rings LEGO sets are slated to hit shelves this summer, and nothing about a game has been announced at this juncture.  We can only hope that The LEGO Group takes its tried and true path with licensed products and sends our favorite fellowship to consoles everywhere.  And if/when they do, we can only hope that the game draws from ALL the source material rather than acting as a copy of a copy of an adaptation.  But based on the company motto - LEGO is derived from the Swedish phrase "leg godt" meaning "play well" - I'm sure they'll make the right choice.