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.

The Supreme Court’s first decision on a Donald Trump case in his second term was a choice to put off weighing in for now on his power to fire the head of an independent agency. In response to the government’s emergency application to upend a lower court ruling that stopped Trump from immediately firing Office of Special Counsel head Hampton Dellinger, the court said Friday that it’s holding off on deciding so long as a temporary restraining order against the government is in effect through Wednesday.

So the court declined to immediately give Trump the power he wants or to say he doesn’t have the power he claims. What the court thinks will become clearer during further litigation. There’s a trial court hearing scheduled for Wednesday on the matter, and the issue could certainly come back to the justices for a fuller decision in the future.

Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said the administration’s application should have just been rejected, while Republican-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented, with Gorsuch writing an opinion joined by Alito explaining why he would have vacated the lower court order against the government.

The federal government had sought emergency relief for Trump to be able to fire the head of an independent watchdog agency, after lower courts rejected Trump’s bid in one of the flurry of early actions in his second term that have sparked litigation. “Enjoining the President and preventing him from exercising these powers thus inflicts the gravest of injuries on the Executive Branch and the separation of powers,” the administration wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency requests from the District of Columbia.

The government application sought to undo a trial court judge’s temporary restraining orderagainst the government — set to run through Wednesday while lower court litigation continues — and to immediately pause the order while the justices consider the matter.

Lawyers for Dellinger, the Office of Special Counsel head whom Trump sought to remove, urged the justices to stay out of it. They argued that the government’s application was procedurally premature and substantively lacking. “To accept its theory and grant its request for relief would be to invite more of the same: a rocket docket straight to this Court, even as high-stakes emergency litigation proliferates across the country,” they wrote.

The application follows the administration’s recent statement that it’s prepared to seek the reversal of Humphrey’s Executor, a 1935 Supreme Court precedent protecting federal agency independence that’s implicated by Dellinger’s case and others as Trump tries to consolidate power in his White House.

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This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.