And You Thought Jackie Robinson Broke the Color Barrier

I remember riding the subway as a teenager with some friends  -- all Caucasian -- when a very inebriated black man got into a discussion with us. 

"You're white, right?" he asked, clearly on the way to making a Kumbaya statement about race.

"How did you know?" I asked perkily. "Roy White!" I leaped across the aisle and shook his hand. 

"No, no," he stammered. "I mean you're white and I'm..."

"Do you know my friends?" I interrupted cheerily. "This is Vida Blue, Dick Green, Alvin Dark and Red Ruffing! Say hi, guys."

"Wait, no, I mean I'm a black man," he enunciated through the Thunderbird haze. "And you are white boys. But we're all here together getting along."

"Well sure, we're getting along," I said, "but I'm the only White boy here. Alvin isn't a White, he's a Dark. And even though he stays over my house a lot, Dick's not a White, he's a Green. Vida's a Blue, though a lot of kids at school say he's yellow. Ruffing is a...well...a Ruffing, but he's Red. Not a Red like Brezhnev, if you know what I mean. He's as American as apple pie. More like red, white and blue."

The poor guy just folded into himself at that point, overwhelmed by a torrent that seemed to him disconnected from whatever point he had been trying to make. He remained sullen until we bid him a hale adieu at our stop, reminding him which color of the wheel we each represented. I'm not sure if we advanced or set back race relations that evening.

That scene was brought to mind again by this fanciful post penned by Jacob Peterson at Beyond the Box Score, in which he calculates what color name produced the most, best players.

Here are the concluding paragraphs:  

After tabulating the results, "White" came out on top. While "Brown" had the top two color-named players in MLB history (Kevin Brown and Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown), there were no other star players with that name. "White," on the other hand, had 8 players with at least 25 WAR, led by Roy White, Deacon White, and Devon White. All of this despite there being more than twice as many players named "Brown" (86) than [sic] "White" (40). "White" was also helped by having relatively few players who came in below replacement-level: 30%, compared to around 50% for most other names.

Coming in a distant third was "Green," which featured solid careers from Shawn Green and Danny Green, but not much else. There have been only 7 fewer Greens than Whites, but the Whites have accrued 227 more WAR.

Right on the heels of "Green" was "Blue," which finished in 4th place despite only having 3 MLB players to its name. Of course, two of the three players were Vida Blue, the longtime A's ace, and Lu Blue, the 1920's 1st baseman who was sort of like that era's John Olerud, though with a bit less power. By average or median WAR, "Blue" easily comes out on top.

The accompanying graph is pretty neat, so see for yourself.

b