The New York Yankees No Longer Have To Look Like That, Will Still Be Acting Like That

The New York Yankees have finally addressed the reason they lost last year's World Series and haven't won one since 2009. Or possibly they are tired of looking like enormous 12-year-olds. Either way, the team is taking action.

Yep, the Steinbrennerian edict of a half-century ago, that no Yankee would ever befoul their countenance by allowing nature to take its hirsute course, has been revoked by his son Hal. In other words, the Yankees have embraced the human face in all its hormonal glory. More hilariously, they put out the above statement to trumpet their newly enlightened view toward the befuzzed male chin. It's not exactly going woke, but it was enough to surprise Gleyber Torres, which is something.

That the Yankees have clung to their history as a defining fetish is no surprise; the balance between turbocharged loutishness and wild self-importance is as much a part of the team’s brand as the pinstripes. Issuing a statement announcing that the franchise will now be joining the radical aesthetic norms of the 19th century is the kind of grandiose look-at-me gesture that best explains the service the Yankees provide to their fans and their anti-fans alike. Well, that and all the revenue-sharing money. The Yankees still don't put the names on the back of either uniform, making them quite likely the only franchise in the world in any sport with athletes older than eight years old to still do so, and the only reason they still refuse to do that is their self-imposed historical burden.

But when Hal, the youngest and apparently most Trotskyite of the Steinbrenner sprogs, started asking around (in his words) about the policy that his dad began in 1976 and enforced with such mockable monomania, he probably absorbed a high percentage of where-have-you-been-all-your-life laughter. The line between tradition and old-coot-hood can be a thin one, but this was such a fuddy idea back when it was instituted—which, again, was when Gerald Ford was president and not at some point in the game’s sainted history—that people had stopped thinking about it by 2000. And that's now a quarter-century ago.

So the question that comes to mind, as it often does, is "Why now?" What market inefficiency did Hal see in late February of 2025 that didn't exist before? Did they lose Juan Soto because of this? Did they make a promise to Paul Goldschmidt when they signed him, or just notice Devin Williams staring wistfully at his stubble on an old baseball card? Did Hal think they could start offering smaller contracts with free range beards as the tradeoff? Was Aaron Judge becoming disgruntled, or just gruntled? Was it an homage to the uncluttered coffee table currently impersonating the vice president? There has to be some significant motivation to change a policy handed down from Pops himself in one of his most Nixonian fever dreams.

Until Hal explains himself more thoroughly (and don't hold anyone else's breath waiting for that), we are left only with the newly creeping Che Guevara-ization of the Yankees as its own isolated development. It does seem to be an unusual tack for the franchise to zig when everyone else thinks the country is zagging; it is, honestly, a strange thing for this organization to zig at all. The Yankees stood for stolid out-of-fashion-ness for so long that many of us assumed they were just waiting for fashion to come around to them again. That having failed, they finally gave in to a more enduring historical imperative: that shaving just sucks.