Goodbye to All That Beard

Associated Press

The trade of Jonny Gomes feels like a real, final end to the #GetBeard era.

Sure, the team’s collective growth of rally beards technically wound up when they won the World Series. Players started engaging in public acts of shaving. But Gomes, who got traded to the Oakland Athletics alongside Jon Lester this week, was one of the few teammates left whose mangy beard resembled those glorious bird’s nests of late October. In a season that looks pretty much nothing like last year’s in any other respect, it was something to tug on, a little remnant of 2013’s glory.

Earlier this year, we started a running scorecard of which beards remained and which got the ax (or a grooming so serious as to transform the beard into something new) using that old graphic the team put out during the playoffs. Now, with beards like Gomes’s gone due to trading, we felt it time for an update. The question is not who got rid of the beard entirely (some, like Buchholz, did go that route). It’s who lost their particular brand of World Series beard (like David Ross), who left the team (like Gomes) or who did both (like Lackey.) 

The result? Of those whose beards were featured on the popular graphic, we found that only Napoli’s really resembles the pullable property he had going on in October. It’s definitely groomed, but it maintains the same spirit. Brandon Workman’s has stayed mainly in tact, too, mostly because it was never that outrageous looking in the first place. As for the rest? They’re still not the New York Yankees. There are a lot of beards out on the field these days. They’re just a bit cleaner-cut. And there are none quite so terrifying as that of Jonny Gomes. Auf wiedersehen, Gomes’s beard. You’ll be missed.