In the early 2000s, Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane pioneered a new approach to building a baseball team. It came to be known as “moneyball” and was immortalized in both a bestselling book and a Hollywood film. This approach involved using advanced analytics and under-utilized statistics such as on-base percentage to field a competitive team despite having significantly less cash than larger market teams. This served them well for a while, until the richer teams caught on and decided to play moneyball themselves with their much larger bank accounts. So now in August 2016, the playing field has once again been unleveled and the A’s are sixteen and a half games out of first.

David Forst took over as general manager of the A’s at the end of last season, and so far I’ve seen some indications that he is reinvigorating the team’s front office by experimenting with a brand new form of moneyball. At this year’s trading deadline, Oakland traded popular outfielder Josh Reddick along with pitcher Rich Hill to the Dodgers for several top prospects. This seems like a pretty straightforward deal on the surface. A team that’s out of the race trades upcoming free agents to a contender for a package of young players. It happens every year. But I think Oakland has a new trick up their sleeve, and it’s this: astrology.

I know this sounds ridiculous. But in today’s baseball world where nearly everything is hyper-analyzed, why wouldn’t teams be looking at this? The numbers are all out there, accessible to anyone for a small fee on Baseball Reference’s play index. All you have to do is set up a few custom searches involving birth dates, export to Excel, and get crunching. I’ve spent the last few days analyzing both the zodiac signs and on-field performance of over 3600 MLB players, and I’ve come across some pretty intriguing information.

Let’s look at this transaction a little more in depth. Reddick and Hill were dealt for two top 100 prospects – Frankie Montas and Grant Holmes. Also thrown in was lesser prospect Jharel Cotton. It certainly looks like a good deal from a conventional standpoint, and it looks like an even better deal from an unconventional one.

Josh Reddick is a Pisces. There have been a combined 617 seasons by Pisces position players since 2005. The average wins above replacement (WAR) per Pisces season in that span is 0.735. Over the last decade, Pisces players have easily the lowest WAR of any zodiac sign. No one is denying that Josh Reddick has been a solid player for Oakland over the years, but Forst has to be looking at these numbers and expecting he’ll regress towards his zodiac mean as he continues to age. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Rich Hill is also a Pisces, and while I didn’t analyze the numbers for pitchers of each sign, we can assume that the results would be similar.

So now it would be useful to know which sign has the highest WAR since 2005. That would be Aries at an average of 1.079 WAR per year. Have you figured out where this is headed? Yes, both Montas and Holmes – the two top prospects involved in the deal – are Aries. Very interesting.

At first glance, the WAR differential between the two signs may not seem all that big, but it is actually rather significant. Using these figures, we can conclude that a full twenty five man Aries roster would win 8.6 more games over the course of a season than a Pisces roster. Fangraphs estimates that one WAR in today’s free agent market is worth roughly $8 million. So those extra wins provided by Aries players add up to around $69 million. For a small market team, if you think you can get $69 million of production for significantly less than $69 million, you have to go for it. Forst and Beane know what they’re doing. I’ll see you at the film premiere.

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Jesse Ceilings is a former American Legion baseball player turned freelance analyst. He once took a six week statistics class during his sophomore year of college. Sometimes his roommates read him his horoscope at the kitchen table. He definitely knows what he’s talking about.