Clint Frazier’s haircut is about more than hair

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New York Yankees prospect Clint Frazier got a haircut yesterday morning, chopping off his signature red mane in an act which the team documented and promoted as an ordinary act of grooming. On its face, this is nothing surprising or even interesting — the Yankees’ strict policies about long hair and beards have been around forever, and there’s nothing to indicate that they’ll be going away any time soon. So there was no reason to think that being a top prospect would grant Frazier any sort of exception to the team rules. But even if this mandated haircut was expected, it’s still disappointing.

Much of this offseason has been full of questions about the fan appeal of baseball. This, really, is the issue at the heart of the debates over pace of play and how the league promotes Tim Tebow and so much else that has been widely discussed over the past few months. The question is one of how the sport attracts new fans and keeps old ones engaged.

This haircut, then, runs in the face of all that. For all the talk this year about how much national star power MLB has and what the league does to make those stars household names, there is an unsatisfying answer here — it encourages an environment in which the sort of personality and verve that could help a player catch the attention of a large audience must fall victim to a team-mandated haircut.

It’s just hair, sure, and it doesn’t mean much (if anything at all) to the fans who are already engaged. It might not have meant anything for potential would-be fans, either! But for a sport that’s already struggling to properly market its best young stars, stripping away an easy eye-catching feature of an up-and-coming player isn’t a good look.

And then there is the fact that the team called Frazier’s hair a “distraction.” As many people rightfully pointed out, that’s rich coming from a team that has overlooked a history of domestic violence to willfully employ Aroldis Chapman twice now. That Yankees leadership would encourage fans to “forget” domestic violence while pressing a standard where long hair is a distraction is a sad display of priorities, if an unsurprising one.