The New York Yankees change their historic hair policy

New York Yankees player and later manager Lou Pinella once showed up to spring training with his hair grown out close to his shoulders. This was in direct violation of a rule enacted by owner George Steinbrenner in 1976 forbidding long hair and beards.

“Lou, I need you to get a haircut,” Steinbrenner told him. Pinella responded, “Respectfully, Mr. Steinbrenner, if long hair was good enough for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, it seems like it should be good enough for the Yankees.” Steinbrenner then told Pinella to follow him, leading him to a pond on the training premises (or a motel swimming pool nearby; Pinella varied the story later) and told him, “Lou, if you can walk across that, you don’t have to get a haircut.”

That was then; this is now.

“This is how civilization ends”

The Yankees made headlines last Friday when they announced that they are changing their policy and will now allow well-groomed beards. Hal Steinbrenner, son of his famous father, explained that he did not want the team to lose out on acquiring a player who did not want to play for the franchise because he did not want to shave.

Their new star closer was shocked by the news. Devin Williams had been forced to shave off his signature beard upon arriving in New York; now he’s looking forward to growing it back. Not everyone is happy about the change; some players on other teams saw the policy as a historic tradition that made the Yankees special.

Award-winning Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay (one of my favorite writers) was humorously apocalyptic:

This is how civilization ends.

One day you’re letting Aaron Judge grow out his jawline and embrace his inner Kristofferson. Another day you’re wearing Crocs to a wedding. You’re reading a newspaper sports column on a phone.

Individually, these changes don’t seem like much.

But they collect, and sooner than later, we’re out in the streets, fighting with sticks, all of us dressed in terrible, overpriced athleisure.

Mustard seed harvesters in Bangladesh

I wouldn’t go that far, but I do agree with Gay’s warning:

“Societies crumble not by the mile, but the millimeter.”

To illustrate his observation outside of baseball, you don’t have to look far.

Audiences were scandalized when Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara his “Frankly, my dear” line. Now profanities including the “f-word” dominate popular culture. There was a day when married characters slept in separate beds on television; now characters on prime-time television sleep together on the first date. Playboy made pornography available to those willing to pay for a subscription; now pornography is a plague that confronts us nearly any time we go online.

However, the same can be true in reverse.

Jesus’ followers numbered only a few hundred at most, but by Acts 17:6 they “turned the world upside down” and came to comprise the largest and most transformative spiritual movement in human history. When missionaries were forced to leave Communist China in 1949, the number of believers in the nation numbered around four million. Today, more than three hundred million people in China follow Jesus; theirs may soon become the largest Christian nation on earth.

Jesus likened the kingdom of God to “leaven” (Luke 13:20–21); as Paul noted, “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6). Our Lord also compared the kingdom of God to “a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches” (Luke 13:19).

When I was in Bangladesh some years ago, I watched farmers harvesting their mustard crops by throwing the kernels into the air so the wind could carry away the chaff and then collecting the seeds on the ground. The seeds were around the size of a period at the end of this sentence, but they produced some of the largest trees in the area.

“Sow a character and you reap a destiny”

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed,

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

This is why it is so imperative that we “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Jesus warned us that lustful thoughts become adulterous actions (Matthew 5:27–30). Conversely, “to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6).

So, to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2), adopt this credo: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8).

Measuring your thoughts so far today by this standard, does anything need to change?

Marcus Aurelius was right: “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

How happy will your life be today?