Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner has announced that the Yankees will now allow beards
Earth-shattering news from the baseball world today, as Hal Steinbrenner, owner (with his brother) of the New York Yankees, has announced that the team is revising its personal grooming policy. The team will now allow “players and uniformed personnel to have well-groomed beards”.
The Yankees have had a no-beards policy for…well, I’m not sure how long, really. Maybe forever. Maybe since King George bought the team in the 70s. I don’t know. I would guess it started sometime in the 60s or 70s, since that was the time frame when beards were associated with dirty hippies and other people considered to be incongruent with the clean-cut, all-American image of the Yankees.
Okay, I went and looked, and it was implemented in 1976 by George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin, two upstanding figures who, throughout their careers, represented all that was pure, right and honorable about the game of baseball. Moral paragons, the two were.
Anyway, the ban on beards always seemed dumb and archaic, and Yankee ownership now agrees.