Movember Special: A starting lineup of baseball’s best beards
In honor of the month of Movember, here are the best beards in baseball, sorted by position.
It’s Movember, that time of year when men around the country put their shavers and razors away and let the facial hair grow. It’s not just for appearance’s sake, though. Movember is the month when the Movember Foundation charity raises funds focused on prevention and treatment of prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health.
Facial hair has been sprouting on ballfields across the country over the last few years. Baseball fans surely noticed the trend during the World Series between the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers. It was right there for all to see with the starting pitcher matchup in Game 1, which featured two bearded left-handers in Dallas Keuchel and Clayton Kershaw.
Live Feed
House That Hank Built
It shouldn’t be surprising that beards have flourished around baseball. Many current players are part of the Millennial generation, a generation easily identified by beards and manbuns, not to mention Twitter accounts, Snapchat, Instagram pages, and being blamed for everything wrong in the world by the Baby Boomers.
Last April, longtime Dodgers announcer Vin Scully waxed poetic about beards during a game against the Padres. Scully mentioned that he had done some research on beards and started off his monologue with the line, “First of all, they say way back to the dawn of humanity, beards evolved—number one—because ladies liked them and—number two—It was the idea of frightening off adversaries and wild animals.”
Scully wasn’t done there, of course. When he starts talking, you never know how long he’ll continue or where he’ll end up. He went on to reference Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, and a “divine mandate” for beards in two books of the Bible, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.
The proliferation of beards is relatively new to baseball. There was a traveling team in the first half of the 20th century known as the House of David that had full beards and long hair, but they were an exception. Think of the many old-time Hall of Fame players, like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle. They were all facial hair-free.
Long hair started to trend in the late 60s as the hippie movement came of age. Mustaches, sideburns, and gigantic afros were popular in the 70s. Outfielder Oscar Gamble may have had the biggest afro ever seen in baseball. His 1976 Topps baseball card is the stuff of legend. Unfortunately, when he was traded to the Yankees, the hair had to go. The Yankees have had a grooming policy that allows mustaches but no beards or long hair ever since George Steinbrenner purchased the team in 1973.
There were some African-American ballplayers in the 1970s and 1980s who sported full beards, like Garry Maddox and Dave Parker. Parker’s beard met the same fate as Gamble’s afro. He signed as a free agent with the Cincinnati Reds before the 1984 season and had to shave the beard. Without his beard, he never again reached the heights of greatness he’d achieved as a member of the We R Fam-A-Lee Pittsburgh Pirates.
The goatee took the spotlight in the 1990s. Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell had Hall of Fame careers while sporting goatees. It should be noted that the word goatee has evolved from solely being used to describe hair on the wearer’s chin to a more inclusive description of hair on the chin and above the lip. Facial hair purists would call the latter a Van Dyke.
The current trend of big, thick, luscious beards was likely started by eccentric closer Brian Wilson when he was with the San Francisco Giants. He let his hair grow free during the second half of the 2010 season that culminated with a Giants victory in the World Series. Three years later, Red Sox teammates Mike Napoli and Jonny Gomes were prominent bearded faces on a team with many beards that won the 2013 World Series.
Now, almost every team (except the Yankees) have at least one full-bearded member. With that in mind, let’s look at a lineup of the best beards in baseball.