In brand design, the color blue is everywhere. Roughly 60% of Fortune 500 companies feature dominantly blue brand identities. Nearly half of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams sport a blue signature color. The “Big Three” US automobile manufacturers—General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler—are all blue. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This makes little sense from the perspective of designers. Differentiation is supposed to be a good thing, but magenta T-Mobile and brown UPS and orange Home Depot look like crazy-uncle outliers against this blue backdrop.

Brands have to compete—they have to work against the idea of sameness and command a premium.

There is plenty of psychological research on reactions to blue and other colors, but to evaluate the strategy of choosing blue for a brand, we wanted to measure how blue actually performs, to examine how it measures up against other colors in competitive environments. After all, brands have to compete—they have to work against the idea of sameness and command a premium. So we looked at the comparative performance of blue and other colors in several real-life contexts, including: Major League Baseball’s 2014 season; the 20 largest sports teams by payroll: and similarly sized data sets from the Fortune 500 and other metrics-based business rankings.

The Blue Socks

Based on the signature brand colors of its teams, Major League Baseball can be divided up into just seven color blocks: blue, red, orange, black, green, purple, and yellow. The number of blocks gets a lot smaller when the blocks consisting of just a single team—black (Chicago White Sox), green (Oakland Athletics), purple (Colorado Rockies), and yellow (Pittsburgh Pirates)—are removed. That leaves us with a 13-franchise blue block of teams, a 9-franchise red block of teams, and a 4-franchise orange block of teams. We then compared the performance of these blocks, using just hard numbers: team payrolls and wins and losses. So, as a “team,” how did blue do in 2014?

The blue block of teams comprised 46% of total MLB payroll, but just 43% of total wins; conversely, the orange block of teams comprised 10% of total payroll, but 14% of total wins. Dividing each individual team’s payroll by its total number of wins reveals the team’s “cost per win”—what it paid in payroll for each victory. Within this metric, five of the ten highest cost per win figures in 2014 belong to blue teams, including the highest cost per win team in the L.A. Dodgers, which paid $751,028 more per win than the orange San Francisco Giants, the eventual World Series winner.

The blue block of teams had a lower average win total figure (80.9 wins) than both orange (82.7), and red (88.8). Given that both the 2014 American League Central division race an American League Wild Card race were separated by a single game, these margins matter.

A blue-logo team has won the World Series just once in the last 10 years.

Despite the fact that more than 40% of MLB teams are blue, a blue team has won the World Series just once in the last 10 years (2009 New York Yankees). It’s also worth noting that the New York Yankees had 2009’s highest opening day payroll of around $201 million US, which was $65 million more than the second-highest team payroll that year—so while the Yankees won, they definitely paid far and away the most for that championship.

The Blue Bottom Line

So, blue underperforms in Major League Baseball as reflected in wins-losses and payroll efficiency. But sports are sports. How does blue perform in major league business? MLB consists of 30 teams, so the 30 biggest companies by gross revenues as ranked by Fortune offer a same-sized data set to examine. While MLB is not a study in color diversity, the Fortune “30” is nearly binary in its color representation; other than Apple (white) and Fannie Mae (green), the 30 biggest companies in the U.S. are either blue or red.