Grabbing a seat in the media work room, Mallis lowers her books onto a table where reporters hunch over laptops cranking out news of the latest multimillion dollar deal.

"I can smell the testosterone in here," she says.

And I notice the patchouli oil that wafts in Mallis' wake.

"How are you?" she says, extending a hand.

"You tell me," I respond, and soon enough Mallis had the date, time and location of my birth for a personal chart. A Sagittarius, I am optimistic and happy-go-lucky "with a revolutionary spirit."

"You can be a bit of a workaholic," she says, running her fingers through a dog-eared book of charts.

It's like she's known me all my life.

Mallis grew up in New York and moved to California in 1983. Six years later, she set up shop in Berkeley as a certified astrologer.

"I hate to be a walking cliche, but I'm afraid I might be," she concedes.

A baseball fan since the Mets went to the 1973 World Series, she didn't turn to sports astrology until 2001 after going to an Oakland Athletics game and seeing a program feature about Barry Zito's interest in yoga and meditation.

"I was out of baseball for a while," she explains. "I kind of went in cycles."

Now she is back, offering her planetary prognostications on ESPN and the A's radio post-game show and for the game programs of half the teams in the major leagues.

Like any baseball analyst, some of Mallis' insights are more of a hit than others.

She warns that Nomar Garciaparra -- a Leo full of pride -- is injury prone, but no one in Boston needs to be reminded of that. Randy Johnson has a "terrible transit of his Saturn to his Mars" and thus a "high risk of injury to bones, knees, teeth and joints, back"; he's 41, but showing no need for Fosamax.

She expected big things for Jeremy Giambi -- that's Jeremy, not Jason -- in 2003, a year that he spent in disrepair and disuse before missing the '04 season and getting caught up in a steroid scandal. She misspelled "Carleton" Fisk on her Web site.

But Mallis has had her successes as well.