Always the trendsetter, Abraham Lincoln.
Rollie Fingers, an All-Star and Hall-of-Famer, best remembered for his handlebar mustache.
***
As we prepare for another mid-season clash between the American and National Leagues in the 84th annual All-Star game from Citi Field in Queens on Tuesday, some statistics are in order.
But unlike other general baseball stat facts, these might get a little hairy.
It was certainly a hair-raising experience (at least for me) to learn from STATS, the world’s leading sports statistical analysis company, that facial hair is actually linked with player performance on the diamond; so much so that over the last decade, players with facial hair have clearly outperformed their clean-shaven counterparts during the All-Star games.
Just consider the following All-Star game facts that STATS so skillfully scooped up and fired our way:
- From 2003 through 2012, players with beards have a .287 batting average compared with non facial players who have batted a paltry .226.
- From 2003 through 2012, On Base Percentage for players with facial hair is .338 compared with .272 for those without facial hair.
- All six All-Star MVP‘s feature facial hair: Melky Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Brian McCann, Carl Crawford, J.D. Drew and Ichiro Suzuki.
- In seven out of the last eight All-Star games, players with facial hair batted higher than those without.
- Over the last four All-Star Games, clean-shaven players have gone 152 at-bats without bashing one out of the park.
Come to think of it, are these statistics really such a surprise?
Looking back through history, would the ``Great Emancipator’’, Abraham Lincoln, really have prevented the country from splitting into two over slavery had not 11-year old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, suggested to Mr. Lincoln he grow a beard? Lincoln was actually the real trend setter when it came to facial hair among U.S. presidents as he ushered in what was described as the ``Golden Age of Facial Hair.’’ From 1861 through 1913, all but two presidents (Andrew Johnson and William McKinley) were decorated with facial hair. Three of those presidents had beards: (Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Benjamin Harrison), three mustaches (Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft) and one with sideburns, giant sideburns (Chester Arthur).
In light of this, you might be asking yourself, would the crushing defeats of Samuel Tilden (1876) and William Jennings Bryant (1896) turned out differently if they weren’t clean-shaven?
Beginning with Woodrow Wilson in 1913, facial hair would never be seen on a U.S. president again, most of it attributable to the mass production of the razor blade, beginning in 1901. Additionally, unlike previous wars, U.S. serviceman in World War I were all required to shave.
Before Lincoln, of course, facial hair planted on prominent historical figures did pop up from time to time. According to at least one historical account, Sir Thomas More, the Renaissance humanist, before laying his head on the block in 1535, pushed aside his beard and said to his executioner, ``My beard has not been guilty of treason; it would be an injustice to punish it.’’
Even Uncle Sam got with the program by having a beard added to his face by 1855.
Today, facial hair on a Pope is unthinkable; but Popes from Clement VII (1523) to Clement XI (1700) wore beards; and Robert Bellarmine (who died in 1621), was considered one of the last great bearded cardinals. He was eventually canonized as Saint Robert.
So forgive me if I can’t help but wonder how history would have been shaped differently, if the following figures had not sported a beard:
- Would God, for example, really have trusted Moses with two stone tablets bearing the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai, if the religious leader, lawgiver, and prophet weren’t wearing a beard much like the creator and sustainer of the universe?
- How much precious pearls of wisdom and Western Philosophy would have been passed on to us through the ages had Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, not grown a beard?
- I hate to think of all the magnificent literature we would have been deprived of if such accomplished writers like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Henry Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few, would have been beardless. Would they have been as imaginative in wielding their pen?
- Would we even be talking about the mid-season Fall Classic right now had Christopher Columbus been beardless, beardless at least by some historical accounts? Would the Italian explorer still have discovered America as a clean-shaven navigator?
- Would Rollie Fingers, the Oakland A’s and San Diego Padres flame-thrower have gone on to be only the second reliever elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame without his signature waxed handlebar moustache?
To all these questions, I guess we’ll never really know.
The real moral of this story, however, is if any of the 30 MLB teams hope to advance to the post-season in October, they might give serious thought to throwing their straight edge razors and Remington electric shavers overboard and start growing out that facial hair. In the heat of a pennant race, any advantage you can muster goes a long way.
Ditto for the 2016 candidates, hoping to be considered presidential timber, including Hillary Clinton, who might go down in history as the first female U.S. president with a beard.
-Bill Lucey
July 16, 2013
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