Combine a Scorpio Sun’s orientation to psychological resources with a Taurus Moon’s instincts for material resources and the result is a Sun/Moon pairing that’s unswerving and unwavering, indefatigable and intimidating, impassioned and intense. Astrologer Sue Tompkins tells us that when Scorpio/Taurus axis is emphasized in a person’s chart, “confrontations are to be expected”. (Source) Astrologer Bill Tierney makes a similar observation in his book, “People with this combo emphasized are powerhouses who can control their emotions even in grueling situations in which others would crack up . . . these signs have a tremendous sense of resourcefulness and indomitable will that can help them overcome just about anything”. (Source) To illustrate: Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher Bob Gibson is a Scorpio with his Moon in Taurus. During his career he was known for his powerhouse array of pitchers, confrontational attitude, and indomitable levels of endurance. According to sportswriter Joe Posnanski, “Gibson threw his 95-mph fastball and savage slider by unfolding into a windup that screamed ancient violence . . . This was the windup David used when smiting Goliath.” (Source)
Stella Hyde tells us that Scorpio is the Samurai and the Vampire Slayer of the zodiac while Taurus Moons do well in professions that focus on territorial matters such as bounty hunting. (Source) Gibson, of course, wasn’t a literal Vampire Slayer turned Bounty Hunter. However, he did spend 20 years wielding his savage fastball/slider combination to mow down hitters as feared as Reggie Jackson, Dusty Baker and anybody else who dared crowd the inside of home plate, a piece of territory that he very much considered his own.
In astro-mythology, the Scorpio/Taurus axis is associated with Persephone’s trip to hell and back. (Source) These days professional athletes are widely considered to be overpaid, over-coddled egomaniacs. It’s thus difficult to think of a career in professional sports as being akin to a trip through hell and back. However, in Gibson’s time things were a good deal different. The salaries at that time placed most players closer to the middle class than to millionaire status while conditions were more “survival of the fittest” than sky-box swank. Furthermore, Gibson broke into professional baseball in the 1950s, a time when there was an extremely intense taboo against black pitchers. Gibson explains in his 1994 autobiography, “Because pitcher is the most commanding and cerebral position on the field, it is the one – like quarterback in football – that the sport and society is least willing to hand over to a black man.” (Source) Recounting his time playing in the South in the 1950s, Gibson writes:
I was intrigued by the one of the many nicknames the people at the Columbus ballpark used in connection with me: Gator Bait. I happened to ask a doctor friend if he knew what the term meant and he explained that one of the redneck traditions down in the lowlands was to tie a black kid to the end of a rope and drag him through the swamp in order to lure the alligators. (Source)
Other experiences of Gibson’s in the 1950s were “too personal and pungent to even talk about.” (Source) He later recounted similar experiences even once in the major leagues. Gibson was a power pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, not a mythological goddess on a trip through a Pluto ruled underworld. However, given the circumstances surrounding his path to and through the big leagues, the arc of his Hall-of-Fame career has more in common with Persephone and her trip through Hades than might be initially recognized. When asked about his reputation for being intimidating, Gibson responded “I wasn’t trying to intimidate anybody. I was just trying to survive.” That could well be a motto for the Scorpio/Taurus pairing.
As both Scorpio and Taurus are survival/resource signs, this pairing is often involved in issues of food and sustenance. Scorpio typically opts for intensely flavorful food while Taurus Moons are nourished by “traditional comfort foods like potatoes and hearty stews, as well as sensual foods like mangos and chocolate. This will soothe their need for security and sensual satiation” according to astrologer Fern Feto Spring. (Source) Raven Kaldera calls the Scorpio/Taurus pairing the “Earth Mother”, an imminently practical figure who “feeds and clothes all who come to her and makes sure that their bodies are taken care of in as much comfort as can be mustered”. (Source) Gibson may not be an “Earth Mother” per-se but one post-baseball business enterprises was Gibson’s Spirits and Sustenance, a restaurant in his home town of Omaha. Gibson describes the restaurant’s food and the facets of its operation in steady, satisfying, down-to-earth manner associated with this pairing:
I’ve always been proud of my chili and offered it at the restaurant much too cheaply, the purpose being not to make money on it but to have it recognized as the best chili in town. I had the same ambition for our hamburgers, which were handmade.
I was intent upon carving out a reputation citywide. For that reason, I had my hands in every facet of the operation, starting with the design and construction of the building. I’d originally hired an architect but when I was dissatisfied with his plans I tossed them out and created my own. When those were approved, I spent a few more months driving in nails.
Scorpio/Taurus often do well in professions that involve masterminding or insuring (Scorpio) the procurement of treasure or territory (Taurus Moon). According to astrologers Suzi and Charles Harvey, the Scorpio/Taurus people typically have a natural understanding of man’s most primal drives:
You have a real sense of the basic impulses that motivate people – love, devotion, hate, fear, and greed. You have a good sense of value and are likely to have a shrewd business acumen, with a gift for handling money . . .” (Source)
To illustrate: attorney turned baseball super-agent Scott Boras of the Boras Corporation is a Scorpio with his Moon in Taurus. (Chart) Boras is considered one of the most powerful forces (Scorpio) in the business of baseball (Taurus Moon). He may be the individual most directly responsible for the average major league player salary going from $200,000 in 1981 to $4,200,000 in 2016. A 2007 profile in the New Yorker quoted a fellow sports agent as calling Boras, “the absolute special forces guy of contract negotiation”. (Source) A 2016 ESPN article observed similarly, “When there’s no obvious source of power in a negotiation, he finds it, finagles it, finesses it, flies it over the stadium.” (Source)
As you might imagine, the players love him as his shrewd business acumen and gifts for handling money have helped them procure excellent financial returns on their own resources — their bodies and physical skill-sets. Among team owners he is hated and feared. They see him as nothing less than a super-villain (Scorpio) running an extortion racket (Taurus Moon) and have deployed their surrogates in the media to make sure he is depicted as an icon of greed to the fans. The less visible (Scorpio) reality on the ground (Taurus) is that he represents millionaires (the players) in their battles against billionaires (the team owners). Legal precedents set in favor of millionaires battling against billionaires are actually highly relevant to middle class workers who must negotiate with multi-national corporations. A former professional player himself Boras’ breakthrough came in 1981 just as was in the peak of his first Saturn Return – an astrological rite of passage that signals the onset of true adulthood. From the 2007 New Yorker profile of Boras:
That summer, he approached a tall pitcher named Tim Belcher, who had just finished his junior year at Mount Vernon Nazarene College, in Ohio, and had been selected No. 1 over all in the amateur draft by the Minnesota Twins. College juniors were seen as highly exploitable, because of the quirks of N.C.A.A. eligibility rules. They had no bargaining leverage. The Twins initially offered Belcher eighty thousand dollars to sign, which was twenty thousand dollars less than Rick Monday had received in 1965, as the first pick in the first draft. (Source)
As Boras correctly pointed out at the time, Belcher was a 21 year old college kid who hadn’t even finished his undergraduate degree while the Twins were a major league sports franchise with a team of highly-trained attorneys. It was thus ludicrous to expect negotiations between the two to be anything approaching fair if Belcher went into the process by himself. Based on Boras’ advice, Belcher did not to sign with the Twins, a decision that sent shock waves through the baseball world. Belcher re-entered the draft the next year and ended up signing with the New York Yankees for $120,000. Draft bonuses steadily over the next thirty years in large part due to Boras’ efforts at representation. These days a player drafted where Belcher was drafted in 1981 will sign for millions — which only seems outlandish until your remember that the people signing the checks are representing multi-national corporations worth billions.
Astrologer Jefferson Anderson calls Scorpio/Taurus “The Leader” who in addition to being excellent at resource management also “feels an urge to help those less advantaged”. (Source) What Boras was doing with Belcher, and scores of young players since, isn’t just contract negotiation; it’s actually resource management on behalf of individuals who would otherwise be at an enormous disadvantage in their dealings with huge sports conglomerates. This makes him, in effect, akin to a modern day Vampire Hunter (Scorpio) on a hunt for bounty (Taurus Moon), a Saumrai (Scorpio) of fortune (Taurus Moon), one who wields contract law and legal precedent as effectively as samurais of old wielded katanas and wakizashis.
Both Scorpio and Taurus are what’s known as “fixed” signs
The world of high stakes professional sports contracts may not be a literal hell like Persephone’s trip through the underworld or Bob Gibson’s trip through the Deep South but it is a notoriously dog-eat-dog world where ruthlessness, lawlessness, and bloodthirsty backstabbing are what’s known as “the nice parts of the industry.” As a former associate of Boras has observed, “In this business, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not doing your job.” (Source)
The baseball world is particularly cold and ruthless when it comes to the treatment of pitchers as they are the players most likely to see their careers shortened due to the repetitive strain of overhand throwing. According to a member of a team’s medical staff quoted in the ESPN article on Boras,”There is one group of people out there that feels that pitchers are a commodity, and you use them until they’re used up, then you bring the next person in”. Boras isn’t an Earth Mother as per Kaldera’s description of the Scorpio/Taurus pairing. However, in a sport that routinely grinds pitches up and throws them out like yesterday’s garbage, Boras has made his mark making sure the pitchers he represents have everything they need to succeed, from top flight legal counsel to sports psychologists and orthopedic surgeons to stacks and stacks of research studies.
According to the Harveys, two metaphoric images for the Scorpio/Taurus pairing are, “A celebrated surgeon amasses a fortune” and ” A successful businessman probes the mysteries of life”. (Source) Both images are actually excellent approximations of Boras. He’s not technically a surgeon but he does have a degree in industrial pharmacology and his firm has conducted pioneering research into keeping players healthy, both physically and psychologically. His firm has thus accumulated enormous amounts of knowledge about the mysteries surrounding performance, injuries, and risk; all seen and unseen factors that enable one player to maximize the long term ROI on his skills as compared to another. For this he’s become a sports celebrity and amassed multiple fortunes; not only for himself and his clients but also for players throughout baseball as aggressive representation of his clients has created a rising tide of salaries for the entire ecosystem of professional baseball.
About the Author: Matt Savinar is a California licensed attorney (State Bar #228957), voluntarily inactive as of June 2013. He can be reached for questions, comments, or consults at his contact page.
