New York Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner announced Friday that the team’s players and personnel will henceforth be permitted to wear “well-groomed beards.” So ends a silly, archaic tradition that was made up by his father, George Steinbrenner, shortly after an ownership group he led bought the team in 1973.
The Yankees’ grooming regulations still prohibit long and unkempt hair, facial or otherwise. But as the younger Steinbrenner put it in a statement, “It is the appropriate time to move beyond the familiar comfort of our former policy.”
A crucial aspect of the creation of this tradition is that ‘The Boss’ was never much of a baseball guy.
Facial hair has come and gone and come again over a century and a half of baseball, and by the mid-20th century, beards were mostly out of favor. Some teams even formalized their follicle prohibitions. But then came the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and beards and longer hair on men were au courant. By the 1970s, Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley was paying his players bonuses for growing mustaches. During the same period, the once-dominant Yankees were in the doldrums, but their young stars like Thurman Munson and Sparky Lyle sported beards and handlebar mustaches. Oscar Gamble had to cut his famously thick afro to play for the Yankees.
Steinbrenner’s arrival put an end to the fun. A crucial aspect of the creation of this tradition is that “The Boss” was never much of a baseball guy. He was a former assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue Universities and seemed to assume that the discipline of gridiron coaching applied to professional baseball. He clashed with Yankees manager Billy Martin over many things, but among the silliest was his insistence that Martin and his coaches ride the team bus with the players, simply because that was how it was done in college football.
Although some Yankee haters would derisively characterize them as Wall Street’s team, plenty of Yankees fans are proud to own that image, taking comfort in a buttoned-down, clean-cut, corporate sheen on their favorite ballplayers. But there are also a great many, myself included, who grew up not even realizing we were the white-collar conservatives of baseball.
I was a 1980s and ’90s kid who listened to Phil Rizzuto’s charming ramblings as he called games on Channel 11. We supported teams that typically offered little more than bad vibes and middling results. When lucky enough to trek to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, we were generally surrounded by slovenly working-class loudmouths in the bleachers, not hedge fund clients only there for the luxury suite lobster and single malt scotch. It was a different time, when guys like Matt Nokes and Steve Balboni were some of the top-producing hitters. The coming Derek Jeter- and Mariano Rivera-led dynasty — and the ostentatious class warfare driven by booming revenues — wasn’t even a gleam in our eye.
A lot of us were not even aware of the Yankees’ grooming policy until 1991, when Steinbrenner ordered beloved first baseman and captain Don Mattingly to be benched and fined for refusing to trim his hair from a stylish-for-its-time mullet length. The humiliation of “Donnie Baseball” — the mild-mannered Indiana native and the only consistently great Yankees star during that miserable fallow period — was as public as it was absurd. The incident even inspired a classic “Simpsons” episode in which Mr. Burns kicked Mattingly off his team of softball ringers for having long sideburns, even after shaving both sides of his head. As the animated Mattingly walks off the field, he mutters, “Still like him better than Steinbrenner.”
The Yankees are big on flaunting their “traditions” — with 22 retired numbers, an annual Old-Timers’ Day, and murals commemorating all 27 championship-winning teams around the stadium concourse. But unlike “no names on the back of the uniform” and Bob Sheppard — the stadium’s PA announcer for 56 years — the beard ban was always a contrived tradition, created by an owner imposing his own value system and decreeing it as “the Yankee way.” Winning and money have a way of making guys forget how much they hate to shave. While some players have said they’d be reluctant to sign with the Yankees because of the beard ban, they are professionals and money typically talks. Examples abound, but few are more prominent than outfielder Johnny Damon, who spent four successful years as a shaggy sex symbol with the Boston Red Sox, then signed a big free agent contract with the Yankees before the 2006 season, dutifully shaved his beard and cut his hair for four successful years as a “cleans up nicely” member of the Bronx Bombers. Winning and money have a way of making guys forget how much they hate to shave. But because you can never please everybody, despite the widespread mockery the Yankees’ grooming policies have invited around MLB, news of the policy change left some non-Yankees players lamenting the loss of “tradition.” I can only speak for myself, but as a dyed-in-the-wool pinstripes fan since birth, watching tightly coiffed, fresh-faced players has never meant a thing to me. I just want the team to win. And if evolving even slightly with the times makes it easier to sign young and increasingly independent-minded players, that’s a victory. Losing the corporate look is no great loss.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for MS NOW. 
