Before the 1972 Oakland A’s hit the field, it was rare to see baseball players with beards or moustaches. The A’s brought a whole new look, one that continues in various forms to this day.

Team owner Charlie Finley offered a $300 prize to the player who could grow the most interesting facial hair and held “Moustache Day” at the park, offering free admission to anyone with a moustache. (Hey, it was the seventies.)  Rollie Fingers, shown below, won the prize. The fact that the A’s went on to win three World Series didn’t hurt their look.

The Postmodern Antiquarian writes:

I found your post about facial hair and the Oakland A’s fascinating. I had no idea that the facial-hair movement in baseball began with those great A’s teams. Come to think of it, I couldn’t imagine Mickey Mantle with a beard; it would be like Babe Ruth without a gut.

Now I don’t pretend to tell you how to run your site. I’m just an omega male groping through the Endarkenment, but it would be quite an accomplishment if you could go back and find out when baseball players first began to eject liquids from their mouths and show inordinate interest in parts of their bodies that are better left alone.

Laura writes:

Do you think it improper for a housewife to show interest in the beards and moustaches of athletes?

PMA writes:

Not at all. My question: Would a housewife kiss Rollie Fingers?

Laura writes:

Well, if she was married to Mr. Fingers and one day he showed up with that contraption on his upper lip, she’d have a couple of options. Mrs. Fingers could perhaps go on an extended visit to relatives. Or she could kiss ‘im and get it over with.

PMA writes:

As someone who had radical lip hair in the ’70s, I can testify that the babes loved it, although I  imagine not many of them would be Thinking Housewife readers.

Michael S. writes:

Forget the athletes. I can’t take my eyes off the guy in the yellow suit. And that hat. It makes me dizzy. I still can’t quite get over the the fact that presumably serious adults actually dressed like that in the 70s.

Laura writes:

Men were, um, flamboyant in the 70s. You couldn’t accuse them of being dull.

PMA writes:

Bad fashion is not bad fashion if everyone’s wearing it.

Laura writes:

I disagree. Even if there was not a single man dressed well in the 70s, beauty still existed, if only as a platonic ideal. If beauty had objective existence, then ugliness did too.

PMA writes:

That’s an outrageous statement.

 Michael writes:

“If beauty had objective existence, then ugliness did too.”

Oh, come now. Everyone knows that ugliness is the absence of beauty. It “exists” only derivatively. Its status is not so much objective, as objectionable.

QED.

Laura writes:

Yes, of course. I stand corrected. So the question is what led to this void in the 70s. Why was the soul’s perennial quest for beauty interrupted, leading to the yellow jacket and black checkered hat you see above? It had to stem from some profound spiritual disorder.

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