Baseball Beard Ban

Baseball season is about to kick off, and personally I couldn’t be happier. Fresh spring air, the crack of the bat, ballpark hot dogs and beer, and enjoying the great American pastime. And as a beardsman, you’ve got the added bonus of enjoying some killer major league beards on the field. Well, unless you’re a Miami fan.

Some of you may have heard about the ridiculous new dress code being enforced by the Miami Marlins for the upcoming 2016 season, but for those of you who haven’t, here’s the cliff notes version – they’re banning beards.

The Miami New Times reported late last month that Marlins manager Don Mattingly is enforcing a strict “no facial hair” policy – a locker room dress code that hasn’t been enforced since the Marlin’s 2006 season. The reason? Well, basically because the Marlins are terrible and it seems like they’re trying just about anything to shake things up and make this a winning season.

In the last three years, they’ve had three different managers (Mike Redmond, Dan Jennings, and now Don Mattingly), built a new stadium, and have made a fair amount of trades and signings to shake up their roster, but nothing seems to be changing their luck. So it makes sense that next they’d try banning beards because, why not?

The Miami New Times article points out that since the last beard-ban in 2006, the club has had a variety of grooming policy changes including “[limiting] facial hair to goatees, but in more recent years, they’ve let players do whatever they want as long as they keep it presentable. The team has also had various policies regarding hair length over the past few years.”

And how has that worked out for them?

“The only consistent factor tying all of those various policies pertaining to the maintenance of the string of dead cells that grows out of the follicles on players’ heads: The team has sucked each of those seasons.”

And if you guys are going to suck, you could at least look good while you do it and rock some sweet beards.