The Men With Two Names

As St. Louis right-fielder Allen Craig stepped up to the plate in the first inning of today's Cards-Phils matchup, it dawned on me that two-thirds of the St. Louis starting outfield (Craig and center-fielder Jon Jay) are manned by players who have two first names.

Questions raced through my mind:

Is it weird to have more than one of these guys patrolling the same outfield? What about the other playoff teams? Are their lineups stocked with guys who could pass for superheroes?

To further my study, I needed to find a definitive postseason roster for each of the eight current playoff teams.

Fortunately this was easy to find: MLB.com shares active rosters for every club and even groups players by fielding position: Pitchers, Catchers, Infielders, Outfielders, and (for AL squads) Designated Hitters.

While compiling results, I occasionally had trouble deciding who to include or exclude from my count. For instance, Tampa Bay's Johnny Damon is an easy inclusion, but what about Brewers outfielder Nyger Morgan? His first name is barely a first name. And players such as Arizona's Ryan Roberts come close, but if we're being precise, "Roberts" is just not the same as "Robert."

To help me settle these edge cases, I elected to let the U.S. Government be my ultimate authority for name verification: if a player's first and last names exactly matched two of the Top 750 baby names for the year 2010, I counted him.

Why 750? Twenty-five players per team times 30 teams in MLB gets us to 750.

Crude, perhaps, but you have to set the cutoff somewhere. If that means we don't count Phillies slugger Ryan Howard because his family name is the male equivalent of "Fay" -- at #905, "Howard" sits between "Lionel" and  "Davon" on the baby name popularity index, circa 2010 -- so be it.

Another note on methodology: since Allen Craig and Jon Jay inspired this research, I restricted my survey to non-pitchers (with apologies to playoff hurlers Wade Davis, Edwin Jackson, and Colby Lewis).

Okay, onto the names. Without further ado, your 2011 Jay Bruce All-Stars:

Arizona Diamondbacks: 0

Detroit Tigers: 3
Austin Jackson (#64, #25); Don Kelly (#377, #306-F*); Ramon Santiago (#480, #133)
* Kelly was the 306th most common name for U.S. females born in 2010.

Milwaukee Brewers: 0

New York Yankees: 1
Russell Martin (#406, #258)

Philadelphia Phillies: 1
Ben Francisco (#692, #196)

St. Louis Cardinals: 2
Allen Craig (#323, #665), Jon Jay (#576, #414)

Tampa Bay Rays: 1
Johnny Damon (#266, #419)

Texas Rangers: 1
Nelson Cruz (#569, #321)

It turns out St. Louis trails only Detroit in terms of stocking up on these types of hitters. If we see a Cardinals-Tigers World Series, I think we can safely deduce that these teams' fates lay in their players' names.

As an aside, I was surprised to learn that so many Hispanic names are popular as baby names, but perhaps I shouldn't be. For a semi-related graphical representation of the rise of Latino surnames on baseball uniforms, check this out.