UFH: Mike Lowell

The goatees, the soul patches, the chin straps, the fuzz, the scrub, the stubble, the shadows, the full beards, the–gasp!—moustaches: is there any sport with worse facial hair than baseball? We here at UmpBump think not. Thus we are inaugurating a new category on the blog: Unfortunate Facial Hair. Let the snarkiness begin:

Mike Lowell, bless him, has got to have the worst goatee in the AL East.

This is not just your average, everday, record-store-clerk goatee. This is a goatee in which the mustache portion is, for reasons known only to Mr. (and perhaps Mrs.) Lowell, only flying at half-mast. Why shave the upper-upper lip like that, Mike? Do you think it would look fat with a full ’stache? Do you think this “pinstripe” of face fuzz is slimming? And the moustache itself seems a bit, well, uneven. Or maybe this pic was just snapped when Lowell was in the midst of a stroke, causing half his face to droop down?

Alas, for Mike, the bottom portion of the goatee is no better than the top. I know that for many men, it is impossible to maintain a truly clean shave. That, like Homer Simpson, they are endowed with a sort of permastubble. Mike Lowell is clearly one of those men. However, beheld from this angle, his neck looks especially hirsute—is the entire jaw region now officially a “hard-to-reach place”? Not to mention that this photo makes clear the fact that Lowell shapes not only the ’stache portion of the goatee, but also the inner outline of the beard segment. While Mike probably thinks those right angles enhance his masculine jawline, in point of fact it actually makes his chin resemble that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I urge the suits over at Fenway to shear Lowell and get him some sort of endorsement deal with that solid Massachusetts brand, Gillette. With his classy style of play down at the hot corner and his distinguished salt-and-pepper hair, everything about him says “The Best a Man Can Get.” Everything except that goatee, of course. A Gillette endorsement would be a win-win for both parties: Lowell would get money and a lifetime supply of razors, and Gillette would get to show every red-blooded NESN-watching man how much better he’d look without the 90s boy-band face pubes.

Mike, I think five blades should just about do it.