As the New York Yankees trimmed away half a century of history, Jordan LeMahieu worried only about the next day. She turned to her husband, Yankees utilityman DJ, and made her stance clear: You’re still shaving, though.

When principal owner Hal Steinbrenner announced two weeks ago that he was amending his team’s 49-year-old “Neatness Counts” policy and would now allow what he described as “well-groomed beards,” many of the Yankees celebrated. Many of their wives did not.

A number of Yankees wives have conveyed: This hirsute era does not suit her.

The husbands often grow lax in their shaving in the offseason, meaning that summer becomes the wives’ favorite time of year. If he won’t listen to her, she figures, at least he’ll listen to the Steinbrenners.

That worked for just shy of five decades, ever since Hal’s father, George—just off his nine-month suspension for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign—huddled with manager Billy Martin before the 1976 season. That spring training, they announced that the team was banning beards, beads, mutton chops, long hair and long stirrups. (The policy was a few years in the making; in Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, Bill Madden describes the Boss’s growing annoyance on his first Opening Day as owner, three years earlier, as he gazed at the players, standing with their caps off for the national anthem. Steinbrenner wrote down uniform numbers of the shaggiest players and ordered manager Ralph Houk to get them haircuts. “We thought it was funny that George didn’t even know us by our names,” third baseman Graig Nettles told Madden. “Only by our numbers and our hair.”)

Yankees relievers Will Warren, left, and Devin Williams, who has taken advantage of the team’s new stance on facial hair. / Thomas A. Ferrara/Getty Images

The Yankees are said to have lost players over the years because they felt infantilized by the policy, but perhaps an unknown number of partners have encouraged their husbands to consider New York in hope of affecting their grooming routines. Indeed, when scruffy center fielder Cody Bellinger was traded from the Chicago Cubs to the Yankees, his wife, Chase, was delighted. “She actually was excited for me to be beardless,” he says.

Fortunately for her, Bellinger is not convinced he can keep his facial hair “well-groomed” and says he plans to get rid of it. Many other Yankees say that they intend to allow only a few days’ growth. “It’s more about being a little lazy with it,” says reliever Luke Weaver, remembering a few times he has been about to head out for the anthem and realized he forgot to shave. (He can’t grow a beard in any real way, he says, so his wife, Olivia, is “indifferent” about the new policy.)

Not everyone is so ambivalent. Ace Gerrit Cole says his wife, Amy, prefers “a little scruff,” but his preschool-aged sons, Caden and Everett, disagree. “The kids hate it,” Cole says. “It’s a split household. I like to get in there and get up in their bellies, and it drives them nuts. They like a fresh shave. They’ll be like, ‘Dad, don’t. Too many scratchies.’”

Of course, nothing is unanimous. Ashley Rodón was delighted about the reversal, says her husband, lefthander Carlos: “She likes me with a beard.” He does not yet have a length in mind, although he is unlikely to be allowed to reach the borderline sentient creation he displayed toward the end of his tenure with the San Francisco Giants. “We’ll see how far we can take it,” he says with a grin.

Rodón adds that he will stay well within the hair length limitations and will keep what he refers to as a “redneck mullet” (close-cropped on the sides, a few inches long from crown to nape). “It’s more stylish,” he insists. “I’ve got a lot of style.”

Reliever Scott Effross says his wife, Brittany, would also prefer he grow it out, but he is unsure how he’ll proceed. After all, he says, “It’s still the Yankees.”

Right fielder and team captain Aaron Judge initially cited the same reasoning. But he admits he has another motivation. “She likes me clean cut,” he says of his wife, Samantha. “She won’t even kiss me when I’ve got a little [beard].” So Judge, unsurprisingly, says he plans to continue shaving. He is the face of the franchise. And in his home, that face is clean.