Astrology All-Decade Teams - First Excerpts

I'll be honest, last night's AL Wild Card Game very nearly sapped all possible interest I may have had in the rest of the baseball season. That A's loss, coupled with the newfound resistance the ownership group is facing in their quest to build a new stadium and keep the team in Oakland might dissolve my interest in the sport for the foreseeable future. But before I drift into the next round of the playoffs, where I'll uncharacteristically be hoping for the Astros to stomp their next opponent, I want to share the first excerpts from an Expansive List I've been working on that encompasses my entire baseball-watching history. This has to do not with the petty, corruptible accomplishments of real world MLB teams, but with a hypothetical fantasy realm, where rosters are constructed based on astrology.

Because when you think about it, dividing players by their astrological signs gives you a much clearer picture of their true level of talent, since there's no way for an astrology general manager to trade a player to a different sign. Of course, the whole concept of astrological signs in themselves is fairly arbitrary, but it's been established pseudoscience for centuries, and there's definitely less noise than having to take into account baseball's complex player development structure, the market factors that drive trades/acquisitions, and how personalities in both the front office or the dugout can affect any given player's standing with a particular team.

Anyway, since 20 years is a long time to think back on without any guidance, I'll start showing you bits and pieces of my list by outlining the most fantasy-relevant player of each team that participated in the Wild Card Games. (Wild Cards Game? Wilds Card Game?)

The first is Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, who has also led the Leo Lions for eight of the last nine years, and he'll no doubt return again this year. Keep in mind that the "SP1", "SP2", etc. in the position column are mostly arbitrary, and don't represent the sign's actual #1, #2, etc. ranked pitcher for any given year - they're arranged this way mostly with an eye towards maintaining continuity of the  same pitchers in the same columns for as many years as possible. But in Leo's case, a Bumgarner/Scherzer one/two punch would be pretty enviable to have for most of the decade.

I'm sticking with the National League here, because the losing team's top fantasy hitter has a career that goes back one year even longer than Scherzer, and stretches across two positions. Ryan Braun started his career for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2007 as a Rookie of the Year third baseman, but quickly shifted to the corner outfield, where he continued as a mainstay for the Scorpio Scorpions for eight of the next nine years (meaning he was in the starting lineup for nine out of ten years overall). Although he's now in the twilight of his career - and limited by injuries besides - Braun was still a big part of the Brew Crew's recent run of success.

For the ALWC winning Tampa Bay Rays, would you believe that outfielder Avisail Garcia is the top fantasy performer in Kevin Cash's bootleg lineup? And he only features prominently on the Gemini Twins because their squad has a historically thin outfield mix, and I stretched/completely ignored positional eligibility rules by pretending he's a regular center fielder (that's what the "*" means next to his name... plus most of the other outfielders in this screenshot). That's who the A's lost to: a team full of nobodies! That's who! ARGH why do I even let myself care about a sport that inspires me to feel such RAGE!?!?!

I'm convinced one of the main reasons why the Oakland Athletics lineup wasn't clicking down the stretch was the hip injury suffered by Khris Davis while making an ill-advised start in the outfield during an interleague game. This is yet another argument for the universal DH, a position to which Davis is confined, according to eligibility rules, and common sense, apparently. Fortunately, the Sagittarius Archers had a deep stable of outfielders to take over when "Khrush" was moved to his bat-only role, although he will surely miss the roster this year, after a down season.


Once I finish entering stats from 2019 into this database, I'll have a full 20 years' worth of Fantasy Astrology data to sort through. This includes yearly summaries of each sign's total output, allowing me to track the fortunes of these teams over two decades. It's a lot of tedious data-entry work, but it'll be more interesting than watching what's left of baseball in 2019...