The New York Yankees are known for their success, tradition, deep pockets and pinstriped uniforms.
And every so often, their hair becomes a subject of conversation — or an article in The New York Times.
Last month, the Yankees announced players would be permitted to grow “well-groomed” beards, softening a 50-year policy on appearance that prohibited beards and long hair. Baseball players like growing out their facial hair, apparently, and the team felt it was time to loosen up.
Journalists have been writing about the Yankees’ grooming standards since the mid-1970s, after George Steinbrenner, the team’s owner, introduced a rule: No beards or rowdy mustaches would be allowed, and hair couldn’t fall below the collar.
In 1976, Murray Chass, a Times baseball writer, reported on the novelty of hair cuts during spring training, just one more point of tension in an acrimonious Yankee clubhouse. Sparky Lyle had his long hair curled, apparently to evade the rules (to no avail). Thurman Munson briefly grew a rogue beard in the summer of 1977.
Soon, the Yankees’ policy was more than an amusing anachronism, but a gift that journalists could use to write about an old game that was full of stories. Think fresh-cut grass and dirt stains with a hint of after-shave.
“Anytime you’re writing about sports and you can find an element that resonates culturally in a broader way, I think you go for it,” said Billy Witz, a Times reporter who covered the Yankees from 2015 to 2018.
Here is a selection of Times articles about the Yankees and their hair, with insight from the journalists behind them.
Mattingly Benched, and on the Front Page
The Yankees were going nowhere in August 1991 when Don Mattingly, the team captain, and three other players were told that their long hair was a code violation. Mattingly was pulled from the starting lineup before the Yankees took the field to play the Kansas City Royals on Aug. 15.
“If someone from management tells you you need a haircut,” Yankees Manager Stump Merrill told the news media, “you get a haircut.”
Mattingly felt there was more to the dispute. He had asked the team to trade him earlier in the year, and was in a feud with Gene Michael, the general manager.
The dust-up was interesting enough for a front-page article, and Jay Schreiber, a Times copy editor, had to write the headline.
“Sometimes without thinking you would try to do a wordplay off the most obvious part of the story, which in this case, was ‘hair,’” Schreiber said in an interview.
Schreiber couldn’t quite nail a pun. So Ed Marks, another editor, suggested a headline, which appeared on the article: “Mattingly Chooses Seat on Yank Bench Over Barber’s Chair.”
“I learned something that day — and it has nothing to do with Yankee hair policy,” Schreiber said. “Don’t always look for a pun. Look for word imagery that is bigger than the pun.” It was a lesson he would keep for 25 more years at The Times.
A News Clerk Pinch-Hits
In the annals of Yankees cosmetology, Johnny Damon’s makeover in late 2005 was probably the most anticipated.
Damon was one year removed from playing a central role in the Boston Red Sox’s comeback against the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs. But Boston was willing to let Damon, a center fielder whose long hair and beard fit his daring style of play, leave in free agency after the 2005 season.
The Yankees swooped in to sign him. But he needed to lose his locks.
On Dec. 22, the day before his first news conference with the Yankees, Damon went to a hair salon for a cut and a shave.
Schreiber, by then the baseball editor of The Times’s Sports desk, turned to Michael S. Schmidt. As a news clerk, Schmidt shuttled news copy from Sports reporters to editors, answered the phone and picked up occasional reporting assignments. (He was often on “Steinbrenner duty”: Wait by the exit at Yankees’ games in case the team’s opinionated owner had anything to say.)
Schreiber sent Schmidt to the salon where Damon had had his hair cut to interview its owners.
It was a “quintessential opportunity” for the desk, Schmidt said in an interview. “The Times Sports section was trying to take on issues that weren’t just sports but intersected with life and history and interests of the day,” he said.
Schmidt, who would cover the performance-enhancing drug scandals that engulfed Major League Baseball in the 2000s, is now an investigative reporter covering politics.
A Prospect’s Hair, a Team’s Identity
Witz noticed the shock of red hair spilling out of Clint Frazier’s cap during spring training in 2017.
The club was undergoing a transition. Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez had retired, and Aaron Judge was just a rookie. Across the league, long beards and unkempt hair had become more common. But in New York, Frazier, a talented young player whom the Yankees had acquired from Cleveland the previous year, was testing limits with his long locks.
Witz saw an opportunity to write about a team trying to find a new identity, and the tension between youthful expression and staid tradition.
“Frazier was a provocative personality, and that was not the Yankee way,” Witz said. “His hair represented: Are the Yankees going to join the rest of baseball in this cultural way?”
Witz’s article, edited by Schreiber, landed on the front page. Frazier got his hair trimmed before the season started.
Scissors and Stories to Come
Much has been made about the policy change introduced last month by Hal Steinbrenner, George Steinbrenner’s son and the team’s managing general partner, and The Times once again covered the Yankees’ hair in its pages. And although players can now wear neatly trimmed beards, the rule about hair being above the collar remains the same.
So it’s not quite a new day in the Bronx. But perhaps a scruffier one.
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