Bryn Smith and Theories of Facial Hair

The Dave Krieg Starting Line Up figure reminds me that there was a time when athletes were bearded. Remember Dan Fouts? He looked like Marty Stouffer. As I've been flipping through old baseball cards, I'm confronted by a fashion sense very different from today. It's not that athletes are uniquely clean shaven today (though I think more professional baseball players are clean shaven today than were in, say 1984), but that the style has changed so. If you look at the top five homerun leaders in both leagues in 2009, it's a mixed bag. Jason Bay is as fresh faced as a daisy, but Ryan Howard, for example:



Or Adrian Gonzalez:



Amongst those who do elect to go with a bit of shrubbery, a more sculpted appearance is in favor, and this generally seems to be much more in common now than 25 odd years ago. Hair now is left on the chin, or there's a thin outline of a beard, or - distressingly - there's a goatee.

Compare your stars of today to your homerun leaders in 1983, both of whom look like they spent the previous night in a ditch:





But let's be clear; even in my card collection, bearded players are a minority. Though it's tempting to draw a trend between -


Glen Hubbard:





Jeff Burroughs:





Marc Hill:





Luis Aguayo:





and Jeff Reardon:





- one must admit that even then, in the the early to mid '80s, these players stood out with their full beards. Mustaches, on the other hand, seemed to be more common. Look at these future stars of the Yankees in 1982:





Mustached to a man and not a future star amongst them.


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I decided to dive a bit deeper into this facial hair trend aided by my card collection. Could I put my finger on an end of mustache culture? Could I find the last bearded ball player and pronounce the end of history?

Not wanting to do too much work, I decided to use as my control group the Donruss series of Diamond Kings. Remember these?





They were cards of 26-30 players, apparently picked by Donruss, to be painted by the artist Dick Perez. They leaned towards awarding long standing excellence, though that doesn't explain Gorman Thomas. But let's look at them with our particular agenda. In 1982, the first year of DKs, 11 of the 26 players profiled had facial hair. Now there was only one beard, which was worn by Dave Parker. But things got a bit more revealing when I broke it down further - sixteen of the Diamond Kings from '82 were white ball players, five of whom had mustaches. Nine Diamond Kings were black players, and six of them had mustaches (including the sole beard). And the one Latino player was mustached.

The following year, 20 of the 26 Diamond Kings were white and eight of them had mustaches. There were 6 black DKs, all of whom had mustaches (and in Hal McCrae's case, a full beard).

I went through the DKs series methodically until 1996, its final year, and broke things down year by year, facial hair by facial hair:



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Here is the same data, done in percentages:



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As you can see, there is a drop in the numbers of white ball players who have facial hair, while the percentages of black and latino ball players sporting facial hair remain pretty steady. And with this I began to reframe the questions I was asking. Perhaps when we talk of the decline in facial hair (as we often do), we are talking about its decline amongst white players. As one sees from the data, black and latino athletes have had a more consistent approach to facial hair, during this time period at least. This is not to say the styles didn't change from '82 to '96, as they certainly did - Ken Griffey Jr. seems to have single handedly ushered in a golden era of the pencil mustache - but the attitude did not seem to change as dramatically as amongst their white counterparts. If we are going to pick a year to mark the beginning of the end of the substantially facial haired white athlete, I think we must pick 1990 and the last bearded Diamond King, Bryn Smith.

But what of this? We are still 13 years deep in history and I just don't have the baseball cards to bring the research up to date. But this little microhistory might help me - and you - as we watch the game and perhaps stroke our own beards, or, maybe, that of a loved one.

But there's more! I have two theories to try out on you all, I mustn't forget this. The first has to do with the Diamond Kings series itself. We all know there is nothing more deceptive than what is in black and white. Or, as Marilynne Robinson put it (I think), facts are what need to be explained. So let us look at the man behind the Diamond Kings, Dick Perez, as he sits at his desk:





A ha! He, himself, is hirsute! Is it possible Mr. Perez focused on stars with facial hair, or elected to paint them with facial hair that might have been trimmed during the season, because of his own bias? This needs to be investigated. Indeed, we need more on how these Diamond Kings were chosen.

Secondly, do you think it's possible that a time came, perhaps around 1990, but as likely before, when white ball players looked around at their bearded brethren - the Glen Hubbards, the Jeff Burroughses - and they thought, you know, if I don't want to be forgotten, if I don't want to be swept into the ashcan of history, I should shave. Because baseball history is probably not going to be written by the Bryn Smiths.