The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy. Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation of what the world might lose when a Bronx Bomber goes unshaven.

The Yankees, as any Yankee fan will tell you, don’t have a mascot. They don’t put names on the back of their jerseys. And most crucially, they haven’t had a single player with a goatee, Van Dyke, or soul patch since 1976. This was the bedrock of Yankee exceptionalism. Although Joe DiMaggio famously said, “I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee”—the quote, printed on a sign, long greeted players as they entered the home dugout—the good Lord himself could never be a New York Yankee.

God, per many enduring renderings of him, still doesn’t meet the team’s grooming standards. Though the white-bearded God on the Sistine ceiling would no longer have to shave to play second base in the Bronx, he would have to trim his magnificent head of hair, which descends below his shirt collar. Or it would, if he wore a shirt collar. Baseball players don’t wear shirt collars at work, but the ban on over-the-collar hair still applies to the Yankees, for whom the mullet remains a bridge too far. After he was traded to the team in 2005, the Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson forsook his own Mississippi Mudflap, becoming business-in-the-front-business-in-the-back, which might as well be the Yankees’ motto.

[Mark Leibovich: How baseball saved itself]

Like a restaurant that still requires diners to wear a jacket, the beardless Yankees upheld a pointless standard long after the rest of society had moved on. “The vast majority of 20s, 30s into the 40s men in this country have beards,” the Yankees’ managing general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, said in reversing the policy implemented by his late father, George, an ex–Air Force man. He seemed to ignore  the fact that the clean-shaven Yanks were admirable, even aspirational.

These were men, I always inferred, who made their bed, shined their shoes, and flossed. My own ex-Army father, seeing me with a two-day growth of stubble, always said: “You stood too far from your razor today.” It was only after he died, last April, at age 89, having shaved until the second-to-last day of his life, that I dared to grow my own beard. “Going for a Hemingway thing?” a friend asked.

No, but the Yankees beard ban did impugn, by implication, the personal grooming habits of countless great men: Socrates and Shakespeare, Darwin and da Vinci, LeBron James and Lionel Messi. None would have been allowed to scratch himself in the home dugout at Yankee Stadium. It has often been said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors. (That was in the middle of the previous century, when both factories were rolling out winners year after year.) If we may extend the automotive metaphor: The unbearded Yankees were a Ford (Whitey), not a Lincoln (Abe). This arrogance, this over-the-top exclusivity, suited the Yankees.

The rest of baseball abandoned classic home and road uniforms for the permanent casual Friday of “alternate jerseys” (beginning in earnest at the turn of this century) and “City Connects” (which Nike introduced in 2021), but the Yankees still only ever wear pinstripes at home—though those pinstripes are now sullied by a sleeve patch advertising an insurance company, another inevitable bow to modernity.

It’s a wonder the team held out this long on facial hair. George Steinbrenner instituted the no-beards-or-hippie-hair rule around the same time Archie Bunker was ridiculing his son-in-law, “the Meathead,” for wearing long hair on All in the Family. Even in 1976, Archie was an anachronism, and with their tonsorial rectitude, the Yankees instantly became one too. Barry Gibb, Bob Seger, and Kris Kristofferson were bearded gods in their pop-cultural prime in 1976, which was not just America’s bicentennial but also an annus mirabilis of magnificent facial hair. That October, the Yankees lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, who did have a mascot, Mr. Redlegs—he was clean-shaven then but now sports a cartoon-villain mustache.

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: Why are baseball players always eating?]

Until the past decade or so, Major League Baseball was a conservative institution, slow to evolve with the times. Ballparks still have signs warning visitors to stay off the grass. But the Yankees, with their fussy barbering rules, took “Get off my lawn” to another level. On the facial-hair front, they were Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, King Canute trying to hold back the tide. And it worked. As those tides of fashion waxed and waned, the Yankees remained clean-shaven colossi, bringing their total number of World Series wins up to 27, 16 more than their nearest rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, with their bearded icons Ozzie Smith, Bruce Sutter, and Al Hrabosky.

All of that has changed now. “Our new vice president has a beard,” Hal Steinbrenner said by way of justification. “Members of Congress have a beard.”

And just like that, the Bronx Bombers have become a little more like everybody else, one more institution in flux. In the name of progress, they’ve emulated Congress. Talk about a beard-scratcher.

*Source Images: George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Sports Studio Photos / Getty.

You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.

As recently as yesterday morning, Musk made clear that DOGE will go line by line through the government’s books looking for fat targets for budget-cutting, including those that are classified—especially those that are classified. DOGE employees are bound to notice NNSA, a 1,800-person organization that sits inside the Department of Energy and burns through $20 billion every year, much of it on classified work. But as they set out to discover exactly how the money is spent, they should proceed with care. Musk’s incursions into other agencies have reportedly risked exposing sensitive information to unqualified personnel, and obstructing people’s access to lifesaving medicine. According to several nuclear-security experts and a former senior department official, taking this same approach at the NNSA could make nuclear material at home and abroad less safe.

The NNSA was created by Congress in 1999 in order to consolidate several Department of Energy functions under one bureaucratic roof: acquiring fissile material, manufacturing nuclear weapons, and preventing America’s nuclear technology from leaking. It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors that power Navy ships and submarines. Even the Australian Navy, which has purchased some of these submarines, is not privy to their precise inner workings, James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me.

So far, the people who work for DOGE have not wished to be slowed down by cumbersome information-security protocols. Late last week, they reportedly demanded access to a sensitive Treasury Department system that controls government payments. When the most senior civil servant at the Treasury raised security concerns, DOGE engineers were undeterred, according to The New York Times. They were happy to blast ahead while he resigned in protest.

The employees at DOGE are reportedly working seven days a week, on very little sleep. This slumber-party atmosphere isn’t a great fit for the sober and secretive world of nuclear weapons, where security lapses are hugely consequential. I spoke with three former officials and nuclear experts about what might happen if DOGE were to take a too-cavalier approach to the NNSA. None believed that Musk’s auditors would try to steal important information—although it is notable that not everyone at DOGE is a federal employee, many lack the security clearance to access the information they are seeking, and Musk had to be stopped from hiring a noncitizen. Nuclear-security lapses don’t need to be intentional to cause lasting damage. “When access to the NNSA’s sensitive systems is not granted through proper channels, they can be compromised by accident,” the former senior official at the Department of Energy, who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters, told me. “You could stumble across some incredibly sensitive things if you are coming at it sideways.”

DOGE employees might try to avoid file systems that are known to contain nuclear-weapons designs. But they could still create some risk simply by inquiring into the ways that the NNSA spends money abroad, Acton said. (Overseas expenditures have been a focus for DOGE.) The NNSA helps other governments keep highly enriched uranium secure within their own borders, and also arranges for them to ship it to the United States for safekeeping. The details of these agreements may include information about the degree to which a country’s uranium is enriched, its precise whereabouts, and the nature of the security systems that protect it—all of which are very sensitive. If one of Musk’s recruits were to access this information on their personal laptop, they could expose those secrets to hackers or spies.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

A terrorist in possession of such information could find it easier to steal material for a nuclear device, Acton said. Even the mere perception that DOGE was not minding proper security protocols could hinder the NNSA’s relationships with other countries, which are essential to its nonproliferation work. These countries may not feel like they can trust the U.S. during a security breach or other kinds of emergencies.

One nuclear-security expert with more than 10 years experience told me that he’s worried that DOGE employees will poke around in personnel records at the NNSA, as they have at other federal agencies. (The expert did not wish to be identified, because he has previously worked with the United States government and governments abroad.) As part of a larger inquiry into which employees are most productive and who gets paid what, they could potentially access the “SF-86” forms that federal employees fill out when applying for a security clearance. Those may contain information about a person’s vulnerabilities that would be useful to the hostile foreign governments that hope to recruit NNSA employees to their cause.

[Read: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

On a Monday-night conference call for concerned federal workers organized by Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, a federal contractor who works with the Energy Department asked what to do if DOGE demands access to classified nuclear data. They wouldn’t be able to complain to the inspector general. Donald Trump reportedly fired the one who oversees the Department of Energy on his fourth day in office. On the call, they were told to speak with security officials at their agency. But this is cold comfort: When DOGE employees tried to access a secure system at USAID that included personnel files, John Voorhees, that agency’s director of security, confronted them. The DOGE employees threatened to call the U.S. Marshals, and in the ensuing standoff, DOGE prevailed. Voorhees and his deputy were placed on administrative leave.

None of this is to say that the NNSA should be exempted from questions about its budget. The agency likely overspends on some things, as any bureaucracy will. But nonexperts will struggle to determine what is essential and what is excessive in its highly specialized and technical realm. Building nuclear weapons is not like making widgets. DOGE can try to root out waste, but it should take its time and avoid the break-it-to-rebuild-it approach that Musk tends to prefer. A tech-start-up mindset might be dangerous, the former official told me: “That doesn’t work with nuclear weapons.”