The MLB Team with Most World Series Titles, Highest Standards

There’s a little known fact about Major League Baseball’s most storied organization, the New York Yankees. You see, the New York Yankees are the winningest American sports franchise across any of the major team sport leagues with twenty-seven World Series Championship seasons and a slew of immortal players as alums. 

Being as the organization began in 1901, the team isn’t just old and successful. It’s old, successful, and principled. The classic pinstripe uniform and logo of the New York Yankees has mostly gone unadulterated in its history and the lore around being a Yankee holds palpable weight to this day. 

Now, everything I’ve mentioned is virtually common knowledge. However, there are small details many don’t know about inside of the organization, such as the infamous implicit “appearance policy” that became explicit in 1973. It reads:

“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.”

On one hand, it’s traditionally the most strict uniform policy in the game. On the other hand, no one wins more and embodies more excellence than the New York Yankees. 

While the rule hasn’t been removed, players in the organization did begin to challenge the spirit of the stringent appearance rules in 2015 when the organization took the infamous appearance rule to its written interpretation limit as a slew of players took on atypical mustaches. 

While correlation and causation aren’t the same, here’s an update. The Yankees started the 2021 season worse than they have in twenty years and haven’t won a World Series since 2009. Standards slip. Results do, too.