Just back from a vacation and, well, look at that, still in a lockout. I guess I can dig into who will be the Mets bench coach, but once that is announced, it will be the last time I think about that position until Buck Showalter is ejected and I turn to the person next to me and ask, “who is the bench coach again?”
So without free agency or trades to focus on, I have decided to tackle a really big issue. Facial hair. Notably the absence of it on Yankees players. Well, that is not exactly true. If you have social media accounts and follow any Yankee, you will learn that their favorite offseason hobby is not golfing or fishing. It is growing a beard.
This also is true for any player traded by the Yankees. It has become a rite of passage (away from The Bronx) that the first act after moving elsewhere is to give a hirsute middle finger to their former employer; a silent (yet hairy) signal that it was joyless distress playing for the Yankees.
And why are the Yankees even still enforcing such inanity — which allows mustaches, but no beards or hair lengths below the collar? I emailed Hal Steinbrenner, who did not reply, I assume because as a member of MLB’s negotiating committee he was readying for Thursday’s first formal talks between owners and players since the lockout began Dec. 2. It takes up a lot of time apparently not to negotiate. I reached out to the head of Yankees media relations, who ignored both text and email. I assume the silence is over concern that the conversation could move into a truly hairy area — like, is your team planning to play without a shortstop this year?
But back to the beards. If the argument to keep Yankee players in uniform clean-shaven is tradition based, then I would ask about that uniform. There is nothing more traditional in baseball than the pinstripes — yet the Yankees modernized (and monetized) by putting an athletic company’s logo across the buttons from the interlocking NY a few years back when MLB reached an agreement for all teams to do so. How about the august stadium? Well, it is the third version of the facility, it is more mall than ballpark and it is a few football fields from the original. So it is The House That Ruth Built — kind of.
Could the Yankees successfully defend keeping their policy? They certainly would have a case. Teams are permitted to have reasonable team rules, and the Yankees have adhered to these grooming ground rules since George Steinbrenner established them shortly after purchasing the team in 1973. Past practices and precedent matter and so, perhaps, an arbitrator would accept that a baseball organization has the right to control the hair length of an adult under its employ. But is this a case the Yankees want to risk? I am shocked they have not been challenged on this yet. And in this age, doesn’t it now feel like the crisis you can see heading toward town, so if you can avoid it, why not?
It is one thing for a free agent to sign with the Yankees, know the policy and agree to accept it. But what of drafted players and, especially, what of a traded player who is part of the MLB Players Association? Would the Yankees void a deal if the baseball equivalent of James Harden, someone like San Diego’s Fernando Tatis Jr. or Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., refused a request to trim his hair and shave? They wouldn’t improve their roster over this policy? Today we could have had Bryce Harper, but he wouldn’t shave, so we refused to take him.
Would they really want to be seen as an organization that would go to a grievance against a player over hair — facial or long? A player such as Guerrero has no control if his current team trades him. Should he really have no control over his face? Is this something the Yankees really want to defend in 2022?
It is an outdated policy. It was outdated 30 years ago when Don Mattingly was benched for an August 1991 game because he refused a directive from above (George Steinbrenner was suspended, but it was clearly from him) to shorten the length of his hair. Does Hal Steinbrenner want to be the guy who gives the order if, say, Aaron Judge or any Yankee decides to carry his offseason beard into spring training?
To what end? What standard is being upheld? This isn’t the military. More and more, baseball is encouraging individuals to express themselves through items like footwear. There is no direct correlation between having a haircut that could pass Marine inspection and winning. The clean-cut Yankees have one World Series title this century. They have won one AL East title in the last nine years: in 2019 when Aaron Boone called his group “savages,” albeit the cleanest-cut savages in history. Is any fan really saying, “Good for the Yankees for differentiating themselves?” Even if there were such fans, should that allow the organization to dictate what their employees do with their hair?
Hal Steinbrenner has important stuff on his agenda — helping to get a new collective bargaining agreement for the sport and finding a shortstop for his team. Still, he should find time on the calendar to erase a no longer applicable legacy of his father. Make it: Gone today, hair tomorrow.
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