Facial Hair: It’ll add three miles per hour to your fastball…

In honor of Senor Caballero Spielbergo (or Ryan Leonard Spilborghs if you go by birth certificates (douche(bag(!)))), I shall pontificate electronically upon the magnificentude of facial hair in baseball. The gentleman/horseman Spielbergo (also an officer and a gentleman) has donned a prodigious bigote (what they call a mustache in Spielbergo’s native Spain). I think in baseball, of all sports, facial hair is most essential. Sure, there’s the playoff beard in Hockey. But what is more intimidating than a guy stepping into the batters box, looking up and seeing this? Your answer? Nothing, not never, no way, no how.

It all goes back to the Oakland A’s Mustache Gang in the early 70’s. Basically every team in baseball wouldn’t allow facial hair and A’s owner Charlie O. Finley said he would pay any player $500 if they grew a mustache before Father’s Day in the 1972 season. And it produced some good ones:

At that time, the mustache represented rebellion. A baseball player could fight the man by pretending every day was Halloween and that they were in a porno. It literally took away the clean-cut image of baseball players and gave us the grittiness we know, love and admire today.

As we all know, true athletes don’t wear mustaches. Only gritty, unhealthy, possibly overweight players wear the mustache. If drinking 20 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon the night before a game, then sitting in the dugout with a cigarette in your mouth and an ice pack on your head, and then still going 2-3 with a two-run homer and a walk is your milieu, you deserve a mustache. And this is precisely what Wade Boggs did (Mattingly looks pretty good too over there on the left).

The mustache has progressed over the years…

The dynasty from the mid 70’s to the mid 90’s.

Keeping it real in the 90's. May he rest in peace.

And that brings us to the new Willenium…

I love Swish, but I have no idea what the hell this is.

Unfortunately for the whole world and for future generations, they let one of those guys from the Geico commercials play baseball.

Then there is the basic, standard, not even that exciting, old-man mustache.

You ruined a good thing, yankees.

And all I could find at www.spaniardsandportugueseswordfightingfortheirladyshonor.com was this .

Then there is the overly popular Liriano which, if you’re like me and can only grow facial hair in those exact spots, can make you look like you aren’t 14, but maybe 18 or 19.

Why did the Big Injured have to take his spot? He could still swing it if you stuck him at first. Japan just wasn’t ready for him.

So, to conclude, thank you swingin’ A’s for bringing baseball the glorious world of facial hair. May it live on forever and ever with more and more handle bars, fu manchus, and anything else anyone can think of. In the mustache world, as lady action goes down, intimidation of opposing batters goes up. Long live the mustache in its rarified glory!

Today’s Random Quote (In Honor of One of the Greatest Mustaches Ever):

“Oh I love your suits. It must have been a bitch to get a 68 Extra Fat and a 12 Dwarf.” - Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit.