Should Aaron Judge Get a Chinstrap?

Everywhere you look these days, norms are collapsing, rules are disappearing, and chaos prevails among the élites. The latest: last week, the Yankees decided to eliminate their long-standing ban on beards. Depending on one’s leanings, the ban was either a quasi-authoritarian assertion of corporate control over personal expression or a symbol of professionalism and institutional stability. It might surprise casual fans to learn that the rule was formal, even legalistic, laid out in a five-hundred-page document called “The Yankee Systems Development Manual.” The manual prohibited beards, and “scalp hair” falling below the collar, but carved out seventies-era-hair exceptions: “Long sideburns and mutton chops are not specifically banned.” (There were also style laws: “Uniform pants must be bloused.”) In any case, it became a tradition, a way to mark the time. In New York, after winter always came the Shearing of the Free Agent.

Regimes don’t crumble all at once, and in recent years there has been evidence of the ban’s decay. Armchair pogonologists might have noticed that C. C. Sabathia pushed the bounds of stubble—a five-o’clock-the-next-day shadow—and that Giancarlo Stanton has got away with a beard subspecies known as the soul patch. The rule allowed exceptions for religious beards, though no player ever claimed one. Still, it could be argued, and it has, that the policy was an overreach, on freedom-of-worship grounds. Lou Piniella: “Jesus Christ had long hair and a beard. Why can’t we?” George Steinbrenner: “See that pond? Walk across that pond and you can have a beard and long hair.”

Had Piniella appealed, he might have established a baseball corollary to what some New Yorkers recognize as the Leviticus Standard of beard law. Last year, when the N.Y.P.D. issued Procedure No. 304-08, reinstating a ban on facial hair, the department found the order difficult to enforce. Many officers, even the secular-seeming, exercised religious exemptions. One described his legal standing to the Daily News as “Leviticus, bro.”

For years, the N.Y.P.D. granted religious beard exemptions only to those who could prove that their beliefs were “sincerely held.” The unwritten rule was that beards, exempted or not, must not exceed one millimetre. “That’s basically a five-o’clock shadow,” Masood Syed, a beard exemptee who served seventeen years on the force, said the other day. “They’d literally use a ruler and measure it.” Syed, who is Muslim, refused to comply, and he was questioned and harassed regularly. “Some cops would be, like, ‘Hey, by the way, the Yankees can’t have a beard, either,’ ” he said. “We’re law enforcement. What does that have to do with the Yankees?”

In 2016, Syed was suspended over the beard, and he sued. He moved for class-action status. “I wanted to apply the policy change to all different faiths,” he said. Leviticus was now in play: “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” Syed won reinstatement. He also won the authority to rewrite the policy’s wording. The rule crafted by Syed, who now runs his own law practice, prevents the department from challenging the sincerity of an officer’s beliefs.

What lessons could the Yankees learn? Beard changes can be liberating but also overwhelming. After Syed’s case, “almost every single police officer in New York City had a beard,” he said. “It spread like wildfire. It was crazy. There were executives who said, ‘Well, Leviticus also says you can’t have tattoos.’ Because guys would walk in there with full sleeve tattoos and say, ‘Hey, Leviticus.’ But everyone knew the game.”

The Yankees of the late beard-ban era had become, like the Supreme Court, or the Cuomos, a humbled institution. There’s a good case to be made that the ban was bad baseball policy. The cleanly shaved Steinbrenner teams won a World Series, on average, every seven years. Previously, the organization had won one every three and a half years. Certain players, without their hair, could appear gaunt and impotent. With head rounded, Johnny Damon saw his batting average drop twenty-five points. Randy Johnson’s E.R.A. rose by more than a run.

Who might benefit the most from a beard? “I was just talking about this with the gang the other day,” Billy F. Gibbons, the lead guitarist for ZZ Top, whose own beard is the size of a small bath towel, said. Gibbons is a beard-history buff and a baseball fan. Once, during a gig in Havana, he learned that Fidel Castro had a baseball team called the Barbudos, or the Bearded Ones. (A newspaper headline announcing Gibbons’s arrival: “Otro Barbudo.”) He thought that the Yankees’ reversal was smart (“By letting it fly, it’s one less element to occupy the mind”), though there were new practical questions to consider: “Will you keep it on top of the covers or under the covers?”

Gibbons and the gang decided that some older players would’ve looked great with beards: Reggie Jackson (“a goatee and a jazz dot”), Don Mattingly (“a full-out lumberjack look”), and Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter (“Once they were sprouting the goodly whiskers, they could actually include maybe some team coloration”). Current players had to navigate the Yankees’ confusing stipulation that the beards must be “well groomed.” “I think that’s a polite way of saying ‘indications of trimming,’ ” Gibbons said. He had a few ideas. For Aaron Judge, “perhaps the chinstrap,” he said. “We call it the Macbeth.” Gerrit Cole could take lessons from the beards that he maintained while on the Astros and the Pirates. “He also had the makings of a nice handlebar mustache,” Gibbons said. As for the manager, Aaron Boone, “he’d have to play it straight and narrow,” Gibbons said. “Let’s leave him clean-shaven.” ♦