It’s my blog. I can rant every now and then. I don’t do it that often, but sometimes the pressure gets to be too much.

I’m so grateful the New York Yankees aren’t in the World Series this year. I hate to see them there anyway, just on principle. (I’m a baseball fan. It stands to reason I’d dislike the Yankees because they ruined baseball with their extravagant spending habits.) But these days it means so much more. Why? Because Yankee players, a group of (mostly) adult professional athletes, must conform with the team’s asinine and childish “appearance policy”:

All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than mustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and ‘mutton chops’ are not specifically banned.

What is this, a 1965 middle school??? What kind of pathetic excuse for an adult male (note that it says nothing about women’s facial hair) lets himself be suppressed like that? Oh yeah, this kind:

Nearly every player on both the Astros and Dodgers takes advantage of their freedom to express themselves creatively through their grooming or lack thereof. And they make the game that much more fun. If those teams had such an archaic and repressive rule, we’d miss out on these cool-looking dudes:

Even the relatively conservative Mr. Verlander would be persona non yanqui.

Instead we’d be subjected to the likes of these clones:

Yikes! They look like dropouts from a cut-rate accountancy school, where they could have been voted most likely to frighten small children. Do you suppose their straitjackets have pinstripes, too?

I’m not complaining. As long as the Yanks continue that nonsensical policy instituted by their former tyrannical psycho leader, George Steinbrenner (forerunner of the current tyrannical psycho leader of this country), many very good, self-respecting players will never play for them, thus keeping them out of the World Series for the foreseeable future.

And that is something to look forward to.