Astrology Baseball: What's the Deal With Cusps?

When I first got into astrology, it wasn't because I believed that everyone's personalities are influenced by their date/time/place of birth. (I'm still not convinced of this, so please like, leave a comment, and share my posts with all your astrology friends to try and convince me.) No, I first got into astrology so that I could sort my database of MLB players by birth sign, and play a season with astrologically-inspired rosters on my favorite baseball video game: MVP Baseball 2005 - despite the fact that this was in 2009 and the stats in the game were already five years out of date. To do this, I used a boilerplate table of dates, such as the one you'd find on Wikipedia. (i.e. Gemini: May 22 - June 21 / Cancer: June 22 - July 22 / Leo: July 23 - August 22 / etc.) While I was aware of the concept of cusps, this table seemed to provide a hard beginning and end date for each sign, so when confronted with a player like Royals slugging first baseman Mike Sweeney (born July 22, 1973 in Orange, CA), I didn't think twice about assigning him to my "home sign" Cancer Crabs.

I revisited this project again in 2012, this time in order to plug my astrology rosters into ESPN's Fantasy Baseball client and simulate a 12-team fantasy league based on the signs. However, by this point, I had come across some research stating that cusps can shift from year to year (whether from the Moon's gravitational pull or because of leap years, I wasn't really sure). To address this wrinkle, I found a comprehensive spreadsheet (an excerpt of which is pictured left) that broke down each sign by year. Sadly I did not note the URL where I found this spreadsheet - I just copied-pasted it into an Excel document of my own - but it looked legitimate, I swear. Now looking back, if I had used this information in my above MVP 05 experiment, I would have placed Mike Sweeney with the Leo Lions, since his birthday fell on the day when the sun enters Leo. It wouldn't have mattered too much to those '05 Crabs, since they already had Carlos Delgado, Sean Casey, Aramis Ramirez, and Vinny Castilla to rotate between the 1B, 3B, and DH spots... But it's the principle of the thing: if I'm going to spend countless hours on a pointless exercise that no one will ever see based on pseudoscience and an old video game, I'd at least like it to be accurate.

So I used this spreadsheet for the inaugural 2012 Fantasy Astrology League, and continued using it for each subsequent season... until this offseason. With my 2019 database up to date, following this season's thrilling conclusion, and my Astrology All-Decade rosters complete from 2000 thru 2019, I decided to see how far back into the past I could push these astrology lineups. I encountered my first problem in 1998, with Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, who played his final season that year for his hometown Minnesota Twins. My precious spreadsheet only covered the years 1960 thru 2009, and Molitor was born in 1956, on August 22, a date that traditionally falls on the Leo/Virgo cusp. After an Internet deep dive, I came upon a site called helloastrology.com, which has a Zodiac Calculator that confirmed Molitor as a Leo. I perhaps could have gotten a hint had I looked at his full name - Paul Leo Molitor - although that could have been a coincidence; maybe his grandfather is named Leonard...

While my immediate question was answered, the discovery of this resource opened up a rabbit hole that I had to follow to its logical conclusion. On a whim, I inserted Mike Sweeney's birth date and location (I haven't bothered to look for his birth time) into the Calculator, and he came up as a... you guessed it: Cancer.

Needless to say, my entire worldview was thrown into disarray. Has my spreadsheet been wrong all these years? Or is this calculator inaccurate? Or are they both wrong, and we should all just embrace the Ophiuchus mess? Upon realizing this inconsistency, I immediately formulated a plan and jumped into action: I compared four different date tables to determine a range of cusps for all 12 signs, which I will cross-reference with every birthdate in my baseball database, confirming each borderline case using the helloastrology calculator (since it goes all the way back to 1920, and looks pretty serious, what with the measure of degrees and all). If any of you astrology buffs out there have any better ideas, or explanations of what's going on in the stars, I'm all ears. Until then, if you need me for anything, I'll probably be done with this endeavor by the time the sun enters Pisces...