New York Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner announced Friday that the team’s players and personnel will henceforth be permitted to wear “well-groomed beards.” So ends a silly, archaic tradition that was made up by his father, George Steinbrennershortly after an ownership group he led bought the team in 1973.

The Yankees’ grooming regulations still prohibit long and unkempt hair, facial or otherwise. But as the younger Steinbrenner put it in a statement“It is the appropriate time to move beyond the familiar comfort of our former policy.”

A crucial aspect of the creation of this tradition is that ‘The Boss’ was never much of a baseball guy.

Facial hair has come and gone and come again over a century and a half of baseball, and by the mid-20th century, beards were mostly out of favor. Some teams even formalized their follicle prohibitions. But then came the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and beards and longer hair on men were au courant. By the 1970s, Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley was paying his players bonuses for growing mustaches. During the same period, the once-dominant Yankees were in the doldrums, but their young stars like Thurman Munson and Sparky Lyle sported beards and handlebar mustaches. Oscar Gamble had to cut his famously thick afro to play for the Yankees.

Steinbrenner’s arrival put an end to the fun. A crucial aspect of the creation of this tradition is that “The Boss” was never much of a baseball guy. He was a former assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue Universities and seemed to assume that the discipline of gridiron coaching applied to professional baseball. He clashed with Yankees manager Billy Martin over many things, but among the silliest was his insistence that Martin and his coaches ride the team bus with the players, simply because that was how it was done in college football.

Although some Yankee haters would derisively characterize them as Wall Street’s teamplenty of Yankees fans are proud to own that image, taking comfort in a buttoned-down, clean-cut, corporate sheen on their favorite ballplayers. But there are also a great many, myself included, who grew up not even realizing we were the white-collar conservatives of baseball.

I was a 1980s and ’90s kid who listened to Phil Rizzuto’s charming ramblings as he called games on Channel 11. We supported teams that typically offered little more than bad vibes and middling results. When lucky enough to trek to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, we were generally surrounded by slovenly working-class loudmouths in the bleachers, not hedge fund clients only there for the luxury suite lobster and single malt scotch. It was a different time, when guys like Matt Nokes and Steve Balboni were some of the top-producing hitters. The coming Derek Jeter- and Mariano Rivera-led dynasty — and the ostentatious class warfare driven by booming revenues — wasn’t even a gleam in our eye.

A lot of us were not even aware of the Yankees’ grooming policy until 1991, when Steinbrenner ordered beloved first baseman and captain Don Mattingly to be benched and fined for refusing to trim his hair from a stylish-for-its-time mullet length. The humiliation of “Donnie Baseball” — the mild-mannered Indiana native and the only consistently great Yankees star during that miserable fallow period — was as public as it was absurd. The incident even inspired a classic “Simpsons” episode in which Mr. Burns kicked Mattingly off his team of softball ringers for having long sideburns, even after shaving both sides of his head. As the animated Mattingly walks off the field, he mutters“Still like him better than Steinbrenner.”

The Yankees are big on flaunting their “traditions” — with 22 retired numbers, an annual Old-Timers’ Dayand murals commemorating all 27 championship-winning teams around the stadium concourse. But unlike “no names on the back of the uniform” and Bob Sheppard — the stadium’s PA announcer for 56 years — the beard ban was always a contrived tradition, created by an owner imposing his own value system and decreeing it as “the Yankee way.”

Winning and money have a way of making guys forget how much they hate to shave.

While some players have said they’d be reluctant to sign with the Yankees because of the beard ban, they are professionals and money typically talks. Examples abound, but few are more prominent than outfielder Johnny Damonwho spent four successful years as a shaggy sex symbol with the Boston Red Sox, then signed a big free agent contract with the Yankees before the 2006 season, dutifully shaved his beard and cut his hair for four successful years as a “cleans up nicely” member of the Bronx Bombers.

Winning and money have a way of making guys forget how much they hate to shave. But because you can never please everybody, despite the widespread mockery the Yankees’ grooming policies have invited around MLB, news of the policy change left some non-Yankees players lamenting the loss of “tradition.”

I can only speak for myself, but as a dyed-in-the-wool pinstripes fan since birth, watching tightly coiffed, fresh-faced players has never meant a thing to me. I just want the team to win. And if evolving even slightly with the times makes it easier to sign young and increasingly independent-minded players, that’s a victory. Losing the corporate look is no great loss.

Anthony L. Fisher

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.

At the end of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday evening, MAGA activist Steve Bannon shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and straightened his right arm swiftly, holding it at an elevated, roughly 45-degree angle, and then quickly pulled it back down again. After his arm returned to his side, he yelled “Amen.” Any person with the faintest knowledge of Western history would recognize the gesture as a Nazi salute.

Bannon has denied it was supposed to be a Nazi salute. In an interview with NBC News at the conference Thursday, Bannon said“I do that all the time. I wave to my crowd, because it’s all about them.” But if you watch the videono reasonable person would describe the gesture as a wave.

Bannon lacks the plausible deniability about accidental gestures that Musk had at his disposal.

Some media outlets suggested Bannon’s gesture mimicked that of  megabillionaire Elon Muskwho carried out what many say resembled a Nazi salute at an inauguration event for President Donald Trump in January. Musk’s gesture triggered a debate about his true intentions. After the forceful extension of his arm — executed with an audible grunt — he did it once more and then said, “My heart goes out to you,” leading some people to believe that it may have been an unintentionally unfortunate-looking attempt to engage the crowd. Musk later deemed the accusations as “dirty tricks” in a post on X. But notably, he also made several Nazi-related puns on his social media platform, leaving some to wonder if perhaps he meant to provoke a polarizing response. “When I see the troll emoji, it’s like looking in the mirror,” he wrote a few days later.

Bannon lacks the plausible deniability about accidental gestures that Musk had at his disposal. Bannon, an influential podcast host and the former chief strategist for Trump during his first term, is a savvy communicator and extremely plugged in to the news cycle. It is safe to assume he knows about what Musk did, which is why some media outlets described Bannon as imitating him. That this happened after Musk’s gesture was widely criticized by many as a Nazi salute feeds the theory that it was a conscious provocation. Moreover, Bannon made no comment akin to “My heart goes out to you” as Musk did, which might have confounded efforts to pin down Bannon’s meaning.

Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, canceled his appearance at CPAC after Bannon’s speech, citing his condemnation of a speaker who “as a provocation” made “a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.” Bannon told the French newspaper Le Point“If he canceled [the speech] over what the mainstream media said about the speech, he didn’t listen to the speech. … He’s a boy, not a man.” The Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes said in response to the speech: “It was a straight-up Roman salute. It’s getting a little uncomfortable even for me.”

So what is Bannon doing? His gesture serves as a signaling device to attract the most noxious, militant and overtly fascistic elements of the American far right to support the president. In his speech, Bannon addressed his audience as “the tip of the tip of the spear of the populist nationalist movement,” celebrated the release of Jan. 6 prisoners and said, “We want Trump in ’28.” Put it all together and Bannon is inviting extremists to mobilize on behalf of Trump’s authoritarian project on a level previously unseen.

Even if we were to understand Bannon’s gesture as “trolling,” it is still an insidious strategy that carnivalizes Nazism. Even as a winking reference to Musk’s odd, disturbing gesture (whose darkest implications Musk refused to fully repudiate), it still radiates an ease and playfulness toward Nazi iconography. Why choose this specific gesture, a clear reference to the most universally acknowledged symbol of Nazism other than the swastika, as a “joke” to “troll the media” or “own the libs”? It still has the effect of making fascism and white supremacy look less ominous and less taboo, and maybe for some on the right, a little more intriguing than before.

Even as a “joke,” it acts as a path to mainstreaming some of the most heinous ideas that humanity has ever conceived of. It chips away at the cultural and political guardrails our society has developed against autocracy, vigilante racial domination, hatred of “the other.” And this all comes as Trump develops closer ties with Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany, some of whose members have used Nazi slogans.

Bannon’s gesture doesn’t mean he is a Nazi nor does it signify a wholesale defense of Nazi ideals. But it does mean he is willing to play around with the aura and symbology of Nazism to achieve his political goals. At any level of interpretation, Bannon’s gesture is abhorrent, and it speaks volumes about his political movement if he retains power within it.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.