Fashion Blogs

Modern American culture is a whimsical fabric indeed. Fads, fashions, and trends are in vogue one moment and forgotten the next. Crowds lose interest quickly in this rapid-fire internet era, and many once-popular items -- Furbys, LiveStrong bracelets, Survivor -- have gone the way of the Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Sure, every piece of pop culture will retain a legion of devoted followers, but only the greatest trends, activities, and peculiarities can remain relevant in any day and age. Our national pastime makes the cut: baseball has been inextricably linked with American culture for over one hundred years. Another member of the venerate group? Facial hair. The facial hair of today is often close-cut and cropped, but it's retained a place in the cultural weave since the founding of the nation, when George Washington showed off some particularly luscious sideburns and defeated the British or something.

But only over the past several decades have the two -- baseball and facial hair -- intersected in an odd cultural amalgamation.

Baseball players have always had facial hair, but its cultural prominence is linked to the concept of the closer, and the emergence of such a role is a relatively modern phenomenon. In the 1970s, teams began to assign one pitcher a 9th-inning job, one who would enter with a small lead and record a few outs to win the game. These men strived to be the shutdown guy, the hero, the savior. They appeared more sparingly than most players, but in the sound and fury of a close game they were afforded an undue amount of admiration. Their exploits on the field helped cultivate their larger-than-life personas, and in the void between the closer's romanticized image and its less endearing reality, facial hair stepped in.

Perhaps it was the concept of manliness that drove them to selectively lay down the razor, perhaps was a desire to be unique in their role, to stamp an indelible impression upon the game. Either way, the list of closers with facial hair is long, but a select few styles seem to pervade our collective memories: Al Hrabosky intimidated with a large, draping Fu Manchu; Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter's mustache was of the same ilk, but he preferred it trimmed and defined. Rollie Fingers' carefully waxed handlebar is perhaps the most famous of all closers' facial hair, and he also found himself enshrined in Cooperstown; Goose Gossage had the nickname and the mustache to make him one of the most successful closers of his generation.

And you cannot write off facial hair on closers as a simply product of the 1970s and 1980s; take a look at today's active closers. The most infamous facial hair belongs to Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants, whose large, dyed beard has spawned its own commercials, t-shirts, and fan frenzies.

In the Midwest, the Milwaukee Brewers' John Axford prefers a Rollie Fingers throwback, though he has not been quite able to attain the same 'curvature'. Ryan Franklin pitched his ninth innings with a large, billy-goat goatee.

Its reach extends far within the game. But remember that facial hair alone holds no guarantees; baseball's record books are littered with the names of forgotten pitchers whose scratchy chins and cheeks are as beyond recall as they are. But for the pitchers who last, the hair becomes a personal flair, a calling card, a crowd-pleasing eccentricity. The curious marriage of baseball and facial hair lives on.

Most of us, however, are not Major League relief pitchers, instead relegated to weekend softball leagues, doomed to pull a hamstring. There's nothing wrong with that. But before the big game if you need some sort of karmic boost: take a razor, look in the mirror, and shape something. Carve something. Design something. And remember: a history of success with facial hair, however vague and illusory, is on your side.

Nor is this limited only to sports. If your profession is one that closes -- Wall Street trader, real estate broker, doorman -- and you find your job performance slipping, growing out the 'stache can't exactly hurt, eh?