The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy. Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation of what the world might lose when a Bronx Bomber goes unshaven.
The Yankees, as any Yankee fan will tell you, don’t have a mascot. They don’t put names on the back of their jerseys. And most crucially, they haven’t had a single player with a goatee, Van Dyke, or soul patch since 1976. This was the bedrock of Yankee exceptionalism. Although Joe DiMaggio famously said, “I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee”—the quote, printed on a sign, long greeted players as they entered the home dugout—the good Lord himself could never be a New York Yankee.
God, per many enduring renderings of him, still doesn’t meet the team’s grooming standards. Though the white-bearded God on the Sistine ceiling would no longer have to shave to play second base in the Bronx, he would have to trim his magnificent head of hair, which descends below his shirt collar. Or it would, if he wore a shirt collar. Baseball players don’t wear shirt collars at work, but the ban on over-the-collar hair still applies to the Yankees, for whom the mullet remains a bridge too far. After he was traded to the team in 2005, the Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson forsook his own Mississippi Mudflap, becoming business-in-the-front-business-in-the-back, which might as well be the Yankees’ motto.
Like a restaurant that still requires diners to wear a jacket, the beardless Yankees upheld a pointless standard long after the rest of society had moved on. “The vast majority of 20s, 30s into the 40s men in this country have beards,” the Yankees’ managing general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, said in reversing the policy implemented by his late father, George, an ex–Air Force man. He seemed to ignore the fact that the clean-shaven Yanks were admirable, even aspirational.
These were men, I always inferred, who made their bed, shined their shoes, and flossed. My own ex-Army father, seeing me with a two-day growth of stubble, always said: “You stood too far from your razor today.” It was only after he died, last April, at age 89, having shaved until the second-to-last day of his life, that I dared to grow my own beard. “Going for a Hemingway thing?” a friend asked.
No, but the Yankees beard ban did impugn, by implication, the personal grooming habits of countless great men: Socrates and Shakespeare, Darwin and da Vinci, LeBron James and Lionel Messi. None would have been allowed to scratch himself in the home dugout at Yankee Stadium. It has often been said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors. (That was in the middle of the previous century, when both factories were rolling out winners year after year.) If we may extend the automotive metaphor: The unbearded Yankees were a Ford (Whitey), not a Lincoln (Abe). This arrogance, this over-the-top exclusivity, suited the Yankees.
The rest of baseball abandoned classic home and road uniforms for the permanent casual Friday of “alternate jerseys” (beginning in earnest at the turn of this century) and “City Connects” (which Nike introduced in 2021), but the Yankees still only ever wear pinstripes at home—though those pinstripes are now sullied by a sleeve patch advertising an insurance company, another inevitable bow to modernity.
It’s a wonder the team held out this long on facial hair. George Steinbrenner instituted the no-beards-or-hippie-hair rule around the same time Archie Bunker was ridiculing his son-in-law, “the Meathead,” for wearing long hair on All in the Family. Even in 1976, Archie was an anachronism, and with their tonsorial rectitude, the Yankees instantly became one too. Barry Gibb, Bob Seger, and Kris Kristofferson were bearded gods in their pop-cultural prime in 1976, which was not just America’s bicentennial but also an annus mirabilis of magnificent facial hair. That October, the Yankees lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, who did have a mascot, Mr. Redlegs—he was clean-shaven then but now sports a cartoon-villain mustache.
Until the past decade or so, Major League Baseball was a conservative institution, slow to evolve with the times. Ballparks still have signs warning visitors to stay off the grass. But the Yankees, with their fussy barbering rules, took “Get off my lawn” to another level. On the facial-hair front, they were Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, King Canute trying to hold back the tide. And it worked. As those tides of fashion waxed and waned, the Yankees remained clean-shaven colossi, bringing their total number of World Series wins up to 27, 16 more than their nearest rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, with their bearded icons Ozzie Smith, Bruce Sutter, and Al Hrabosky.
All of that has changed now. “Our new vice president has a beard,” Hal Steinbrenner said by way of justification. “Members of Congress have a beard.”
And just like that, the Bronx Bombers have become a little more like everybody else, one more institution in flux. In the name of progress, they’ve emulated Congress. Talk about a beard-scratcher.
*Source Images: George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Sports Studio Photos / Getty.
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