Face Palm
If I See a Single Hair of Stubble on Aaron Judge's Chin I'm Going to Throw A Chicken Bucket At Him
As I’ve written before, to understand the Yankees, you have to understand their ghosts, and to understand their ghosts, you have to understand their self-image. The way the Yankees see themselves is that they are very special. All teams think they are special of course, otherwise why would anyone care about their team? But the Yankees take their self-declared exceptionalism to ludicrous heights, and while that mostly involves lofty rhetoric about “The Yankee Way,” “earning your pinstripes,” about playing in a “cathedral,” about “being able to handle the New York Media,” some of it requires tangible differentiation. The Yankees spend more money than any other team, or at least they did for two decades. And to prove to themselves that this is not the main reason the Yankees are special (a non-Yankee fan will never find this remotely convincing), they also do other stuff differently. Yankee prospects are treated like talismanic, messiah figures who are destined for greatness by virtue of their years gestating “in the system,” where they can imbue all the special Yankeeness. Yankee pitchers are taught special Yankee pitches that go “whirrr” instead of “whoosh.” In addition to their very special stripes, Yankee uniforms are unique to the MLB in their lack of player last names on the back, for both home and away games. Well into the 21st century, Yankees players and staff were required to wear a full suit and tie on the team airplane, only lifting this when the front office showed ownership research demonstrating that this policy reduced players’ ability to sleep in a way that had a measurable impact on performance.
And since the 1970s, Yankees players are not allowed to have facial hair. They must be clean-shaven, and with no scalp hair extending below the collar. “I have nothing against long hair per se,” owner George Steinbrenner, a graduate of the Culver Military Academy and former Air Force lieutenant, told The New York Times in 1978, “but I’m trying to instill a certain sense of order and discipline in the ballclub.” These fascistic ideas of order and discipline, very closely tied to the worship of “hustle” and “playing every day,” the denunciation of laziness, and general feeling that players are prima donnas who are wildly overpaid and don’t know their place, are core tenets of Yankee exceptionalism, and are perfectly embodied in the hair policy, which has ruled over Yankees players for five decades.
No longer. “We will be amending our expectations to allow our players and uniformed personnel to have well-groomed beards moving forward,” announced owner Hal Steinbrenner (George’s son) this morning. The reaction from the various constituencies in Yankeeland have been overwhelmingly positive. “WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE BACK,” commented one commenter on the Yankees subreddit, immediately receiving hundreds of upvotes and dozens of replies with similar sentiments. “Great decision! Good to see them move into this century!” tweeted New York Post columnist Jon Heyman. The policy “had not only become antiquated, but detrimental.” wrote his Post colleague Joel Sherman. “Finally” tweeted the Empire State Building (you guys are on thin ice over there).
Allow me to jump in here. These people are all whiny wimps. The facial hair policy RULED. This decision absolutely sucks, it’s cowardly, idiotic, and insulting, and like everything else that has happened this offseason, it signals a break from the hegemonic status quo that could have severe, catastrophic supernatural repercussions.
Look. Most of the fascist stuff I described above is dumb and bad. I wish fans were nicer to expensive free agent mercenaries like Alex Rodriguez and Giancarlo Stanton, and less blindly adoring to homegrown guys like Anthony Volpe and Derek Jeter (and yes, Aaron Judge, who, whether anyone else will admit it, prevented us from winning a World Series far more than any other member of that team). I wish fans didn’t rage at our beloved, charming, wildly successful manager, because he doesn’t satisfy their bloodlust for discipline and public humiliation of his players.
But the facial hair policy was about more than that. First of all, as a matter of aesthetics, George was and remains a hundred percent correct on this. Professional baseball players are gifted with physical and cerebral talents beyond comprehension, but the vast majority of them look absolutely terrible doing it. Unlike NBA players, who pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of fashion and culture, they are goofy, unkempt, and uncouth, spitting large globs of dip on the field while scratching their crotches. There are athletes with classy beards, like Lebron James, Lionel Messi, and Connor McDavid. Baseball players grow lazy, shaggy, ungroomed blobs on their faces just to prove they can, and end up somewhere between Duck Dynasty, aughts Shia Lebouf, and (sorry for beating up on the punching bag de jour) Travis Kelce. With one neat trick, the Yankees guaranteed themselves a top spot in the Most Attractive Team rankings every year, which may not have been insignificant to their growth to being a singular, massive global brand.
Even more importantly, it FREAKING WORKED!!!! Players would come to the Yankees, grudgingly shave their monstrous locks, and immediately play better. Then they would leave, invariably grow a beard on the Mets or some other team, and play worse. Examples include Nick Swisher (hit .219 with on 588 plate appearances on the 2008 Chicago White Sox while rocking this triangle beard, then shaved, hit .249 the next year and .288 the year after, with significant defensive improvement as well), Melky Cabrera (negative WAR on the 2010 Braves with this ridiculous chin strap thing after winning a World Series with us clean-shaven the previous year), Dellin Betances (no wonder he had an ERA above 7 on the Mets in 2020 looking like this), and Roughned Odor (he wasn’t that good on the Yankees either, but it was his only positive WAR season of his last five and it must have had something to do with his neck muscles being able to relax for the first time after carrying all that hair around for so long) (Now look, did I just cherry-pick these guys? And even if it were true that on average, players got better after they joined and before they left the Yankees, is that really more likely to be because of facial hair practices rather than the Yankees’ well-established scouting ability? These are impertinent questions and I won’t be taking them at this time.)
And in addition to making the players look better and play better, the beard policy played an important psychological role for the fans, by helping us acclimate to new acquisitions, especially from former foes. Did I want to root for Johnny Damon in 2006, when the Yankees shelled out $52 million over four years to poach him from the Red Sox? No. That guy had hurt me and my team repeatedly, and I hated him for it. But when I saw him in pinstripes for the first time, with a fresh shave and stylish sunglasses instead of the insane Geico Caveman situation he had going on in Boston, I felt better. “He’s a new man.” I thought, “He’s changed. He’s not going to hurt me anymore.” He became one of my favorite players, and (obviously) single-handedly carried the team through long stretches of the 2009 World Series campaign.
Ultimately, it was, like the right-field bleachers roll call, a tiny, tangible way that fans could exert their will on the game. We can’t get our star players out of slumps. We can’t get them to heal from mysterious arm injuries. We can’t get them to cover first base or catch routine fly-balls, or cleanly field weak throws to the cutoff man, or call a pitch that Freddie Freeman isn’t expecting. But for fifty years, we could extract this tiny concession, in exchange for the immense power they hold over our minds and our moods. We could haze them in this one small way. We could make them shave.
It was dumb. But it worked, it looked good, it felt good, and it coincided with one of the most dominant, dynastic championship runs in sports history. And Mariano Rivera was willing to put up with it. Devin Williams, you better be absolutely lights out unhittable for this.