Stick with any style long enough, and it’s bound to come back. I wanted a beard before it was biologically possible, and have let mine grow, most of the time, since I was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies. But I’ve been a Mets fan even longer—therefore, by baseball’s implacable logic, also a Red Sox fan (the enemy of my enemy)—which is why I take special delight in Boston’s championship drive. Midway through the summer, when the Mets’ chances had dwindled to historic improbability, I clicked for consolation to the YES (“Yankees’ Entertaining Schadenfreude”?) Network to see them battle their nemeses from the north, and was shocked to see that Beantown had morphed into Beardtown.

The surprising luxuriance of the Red Sox’s facial foliage brought to mind a family memory—my father’s snarky suggestion, when I first grew a beard, that I might try out for the House of David. (He had to explain the reference to the barnstorming teams—featuring bearded and long-haired players—that were formed by a Christian sect that looked back to ancient Israel; his jibe about the Smith Brothers, of the cough drops, I got.) Those teams, of course, traded on the splendid incongruity of athletes with quasi-rabbinical beards, and yet, with the modern-day Red Sox, the beards makes perfect sense.

There’s no point to a trimmed and well-groomed beard, which resembles exactly the sort of suburban lawn that often led to the growing of the beard in the first place. (That’s why my hero among this year’s pennant-winning crop is Mike Napoli, whose dense and colorful beard is as gonzo as his all-or-nothing, free-swinging style at the plate.) One of the beauties of the beard is that its lushness is polysemic, lending itself to an interpretive exuberance to match its flow.

A beard is a celebration of nature that brings appearance closer to that of untamed human animals—a Rousseau-esque gesture that was crucial to the age of Aquarius, a time when long-established norms of behavior collapsed and made public life a clearer expression of formerly unspeakable private desires. By contrast, the shaven and crew-cut athlete suggests a martial fury that is joyless—a grim, self-denying efficiency that may work in war but is exactly the opposite of the essence of baseball, which, for all its competitive ardor, is playtime. (And the over-all increasing regimentation and militarization of modern life has no more powerful, intimate symbol than the fanatical prevalence of depilation.)

For an athlete, the beard suggests a return to nature as well, to a different sort of battle—to the feral ferocity of medieval or primitive men, or, at least, to the rugged outdoorsiness of nineteenth-century man in confrontation with the elements, both on and off the stubbly and rock-strewn sporting fields. Yet the religious or sacerdotal side of a beard is never far behind: it implies a monastic indifference to worldly cares, a hermetic withdrawal from ordinary concerns, and a fixed focus on the higher mysteries, whether divine, philosophical, or the split-finger fastball.

So it should be pretty obvious which team I’m rooting for in the series, all the more so because there’s still bad blood between me and Adam Wainwright.

Photograph by Mike Ehrmann/Getty.