Category Archives: Major League Mustaches

In which the major-league mustache explosion continues unabated, shooting from 28 percent to 37 percent—remember, it was only 3 percent three years ago. In this idiom, the Cinderella story of 1976 is surely the Milwaukee Brewers, previously forbidden to get … Continue reading →

28 percent of the players in the 1975 Topps set are sporting mustaches, up from 17 percent the year before. Milwaukee, California, Montreal, and Cincinnati remain holdouts for Squaresville; Houston, which boasted four ’staches in ’74, is down to zero, … Continue reading →

1974 is when it all blows up. Seventeen percent of the players depicted in this year’s Topps set have mustaches, up from 3 percent in 1973; above, we have the first all-facial-hair League Leaders card, and, while it is now … Continue reading →

I’d always known about the Yankee ban on beards, which lately has been added to the litany of aspersions against them (fascists!) but in my opinion has spared me the indignity of being forced to regularly watch men who have … Continue reading →

By 1973, there are still few enough baseballers with mustaches to list by name—twenty—but you can tell that the storm is about to hit. The racial barrier is finally crossed: Jim Willoughby, card # 79, is the first mustached white … Continue reading →

The 1972 set should have a ton of guys with mustaches. Surely, at least, the people who designed these swingin’ cards had mustaches. But as with the 1971 set, there’s only one ‘stache in the batch. (That rhymes.) But if … Continue reading →

Back in baseball’s frontier days, everyone had mustaches. But then, at some point—exactly when and why will perhaps be examined at a later date, but let’s just say the 1910s for now—ballplayers started going clean-faced. Maybe it had to do … Continue reading →