Stick It in Your Ear: How Rebellion Makes Baseball Occasionally Cool

Cheating, if you haven’t heard, is extremely cool. To look at the rules as listed, tilt your sunglasses down and, while loudly chewing gum, announce that nah, the rules are not for you, is the absolute peak of baditude. Why do you think teams have been doing it for generations? To weaken the integrity of the game and remind people that it’s nothing but a useless novelty and none of it really matters? Of course not. They’ve done it because rules are just the box society wants to keep us in. Our job as cool people is to continuously break out of it.

So it makes sense that Astros fans are leaning into their new persona as people desperate to be victims of an unclear injustice, “turning heel” to the rest of the league, as if they had at any point throughout this cheating scandal been considered heroes.

Is it “cool” to break the sport and get fans across baseball to wonder why they even bother watching? I mean, sort of. It’s at least been a more talkative offseason for baseball, with more going on than simply waiting for top free agents to sign somewhere. The violent spasms going on as baseball fights with a modern version of itself are unbecoming, but they are certainly more interesting than waiting out the late winter hellscape with a list of top ten spring training hairdos.

It’s an interesting exercise to look back through baseball and determine what has been “cool” through the years. You’re reading FanGraphs, so obviously you live at the intersection of “baseball” and “coolness.” But there was a time when coolness in this sport wasn’t defined by colorful charts or $30 t-shirts that warn people the wearer is despised among their peers. In fact, it was this day 20 years ago when we were reminded that baseball’s coolest players were identified by the bejeweling of their ear lobes.

In February of 2000, Ken Griffey Jr. wanted to come home, and he took a huge pay cut to get there. Traded to Cincinnati from Seattle after becoming the best player in the league, he signed a nine-year extension with the Reds worth $116.5 million to play in his hometown. A good $57.5 million of that total was deferred with interest; he is still getting paid for it and will be through 2025. The deal was such an act of charity by Griffey that Bud Selig was practically crying when he heard about it, repeatedly saying “Thank you!” according to Sports Illustrated.

But there were still some kinks to work out. For instance, the Reds had held fast to a rule for anyone on their roster: No facial hair, and no earrings. These were signs of unkempt rebellion, and no true ball player could display them without starting a small riot.

Griffey famously wore a diamond stud in his left ear at a time when doing so caused arm-flailing speculation and deep self-reflection on the part of older fans. A Baltimore Sun columnist who had commented in 1994 that Griffey’s earring was “the size of the Sears Tower” wrote that “I don’t stick pins in any parts of my body any more than I voluntarily drop blocks of cement on my head or read books written by Tom Clancy.”

That same year, Reds owner Marge Schott was famously less verbose on the topic when she said that “Only fruits wear earrings.” Claiming that the comment had been “misconstrued,” which seems difficult to believe seeing as it’s only four words long, she was grateful that her team appeared to stand behind her during the brief fallout of her remark.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“I’m very proud of what the team members said. They know where I’m coming from,” [Schott] said, noting that some Reds agreed that players with earrings aren’t good role models.

Schott’s head full of racist steam is well known (interesting fact from this SI feature on her; did you know that Schott had five family members who fought for Germany in World War II?), but there was a presiding societal concern appearing in weekly columns and snarky remarks that a small piece of jewelry, when worn by a man, would lead to the collapse of the natural order.

It would appear then that the Reds had a problem on their hands, as the greatest player of a generation, and apparently a poor role model for Cincinnati-area children, Ken Griffey Jr., was headed straight for the Queen City with a twinkle in his ear.

There’d been a similar wrinkle in 1999, the year prior. The Reds had swung a trade for Padres slugger Greg Vaughn, startling the 33-year-old not just because of his sudden relocation to a small market, but because the Reds, a team whose mascot is famously mustachioed, had a long-standing ban on facial hair. Pete Rose had once asked A’s hurler Rollie Fingers if he wanted to come play for Cincinnati, and Fingers told him no.

“I wasn’t going to shave my mustache to play for the Reds,” Fingers said years later.

The Vaughn trade had gone down in the late nineties, remember – a time that repeatedly taught us that when a man made a promise to his goatee, he kept it, no matter how many times his employer waved a razor at him. Though he said he would ignore the policy, or even file a grievance against the team, Vaughn still called Reds shortstop Barry Larkin for reassurance.

“I told him to go to the boss on that one,” Larkin told reporters. (Tampa Bay Times, April 3, 1999)

So Vaughn did. And two weeks after the trade, the 32-year-old rule was wiped from the books. But the ban on earrings had remained. Until now, obviously.

Reds GM Jim Bowden and COO John Allen had, according to Bowden, determined earlier in the offseason that the ban on earrings, which allowed players to wear them in the locker room but not on the field, was “archaic.” Just like the facial hair ban, which had been destroyed by Vaughn the year before, it was “outdated,” Bowden said to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “as long as it’s a stud and doesn’t go below the earlobe.”

What a happy coincidence, it seemed, that the exact kind of earring Griffey wore was the exact kind of earring the Reds would now allow! Truly it was joyous news for the state of Ohio as it welcomed back its wayward son.

Griffey the player was elite, but Griffey the fashion icon changed everything. From the moment he touched the warehouse at Camden Yards with a home run derby shot while wearing his hat backwards, he made the front of his baseball card as impactful as the back. That little diamond stud that gave columnists night terrors helped close a meaningless chapter in Reds history and usher in a new era for both the Reds franchise and coolness.

And so once more, coolness caught up to baseball, shook things up, and went away for a while. These days it’s back in the form of embracing the hate you receive for rampant cheating at the game’s highest level. How will baseball get even cooler in the days ahead? We’ll just have to wait and see what rule they break next.