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...