Yankees’ Wives Carrying On Team’s Abandoned Battle Against Beards
The franchise’s facial hair policy has gone down the drain, but many Yankees are staying clean-shaven at the insistence of their better halves.
As the New York Yankees trimmed away half a century of history, Jordan LeMahieu worried only about the next day. She turned to her husband, Yankees utilityman DJ, and made her stance clear: You’re still shaving, though.
When principal owner Hal Steinbrenner announced two weeks ago that he was amending his team’s 49-year-old “Neatness Counts” policy and would now allow what he described as “well-groomed beards,” many of the Yankees celebrated. Many of their wives did not.
A number of Yankees wives have conveyed: This hirsute era does not suit her.
The husbands often grow lax in their shaving in the offseason, meaning that summer becomes the wives’ favorite time of year. If he won’t listen to her, she figures, at least he’ll listen to the Steinbrenners.
That worked for just shy of five decades, ever since Hal’s father, George—just off his nine-month suspension for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign—huddled with manager Billy Martin before the 1976 season. That spring training, they announced that the team was banning beards, beads, mutton chops, long hair and long stirrups. (The policy was a few years in the making; in Steinbrenner:
The Last Lion of Baseball, Bill Madden describes the Boss’s growing annoyance on his first Opening Day as owner, three years earlier, as he gazed at the players, standing with their caps off for the national anthem. Steinbrenner wrote down uniform numbers of the shaggiest players and ordered manager Ralph Houk to get them haircuts. “We thought it was funny that George didn’t even know us by our names,” third baseman Graig Nettles told Madden. “Only by our numbers and our hair.”)
