This exercise has brought into focus the differences between setting a traditional fantasy lineup (which follows how real life major league players perform in actual games) and building a roster for a simulation (which uses computer models of each player based on quantifiable skillsets). To set the former, fantasy team owners must rely on Rankings (at least until they have a large enough sample size of statistics in the current season), whereas to build the latter, video game players can go off the game's displayed Ratings for various attributes (e.g. stamina for pitchers, contact/power hitting for batters). For Rankings, lower is better (i.e. Mike Trout is the #1 ranked fantasy player), while for Ratings, higher is better (i.e. Mike Trout's overall rating is 99 out of 100).
With these general parameters in mind, I tallied up the Ratings for each player in the Fantasy Astrology landscape in an effort to gauge the general talent level of the 12 Fantasy Astrology teams/signs. The results might shock and surprise you... or then again, they may not!
One thing that should come as no shock: when adding up the ratings from every player in a particular sign's talent pool, the sum total of ratings directly correlates to the number of players in that sign's pool. Thus Virgo, with its 137 players, predictably towers over signs with a player pool that numbers in the low 100's, or even the 90's, as in Aquarius and Scorpio. Where things get interesting is when you calculate the average rating across each player pool. The range is not very wide at all, with all but three signs averaging some fraction of 70, but there is a somewhat clearer hierarchy that emerges. Using the averages, Aries comes out on top, as the only sign with an average player that tops 71, despite having 16 fewer players to work with than Virgo. Following them, we have last year's surprise champion Gemini (70.94), then the always dangerous Leo (70.82), before we get to the league leading sign (70.73).
Next, to try and even the playing field, I added up the ratings over each sign's top 40 and top 25 players, since that's the maximum amount of players an MLB team can have on its expanded and active rosters, respectively. Keep in mind that I didn't go through and construct full rosters, balanced for positions and all that, but rather just sorted the Rating column best-to-worst and tallied up the appropriate number of players. Doing this causes the totals and the averages to line up (which is logical, since we're dividing by the same number of players each time), but it also causes Virgo to jump back into the lead across all metrics. In fact, there are only two changes when moving from the 40- to the 25-player selections: Libra and Gemini swap positions between #4 and #5, and Scorpio leapfrogs Pisces and Capricorn, moving from #11 to #9, and pushing the other two down correspondingly. It's a very small margin (especially where the 25-player sample is concerned, with just 2 numbers separating 1st place Virgo and 2nd place Aries) and the average range is quite narrow (although not nearly as narrow as when you look at the entire player pool), but again, it's a good snapshot of what the most powerful signs in the sky are.
It's anyone's guess if/how these video game-based analytics correlate to what's actually going on in the fantasy astrology landscape as it applies to the actual major leagues, but consider this a baseline to start with as we head into the summer.
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