Globe iconLogin iconRecap iconSearch iconTickets icon

The Indians might have the most interesting hairstyles in all of MLB

The following is a transcript of a segment from this week's episode of the Cut4Cast podcast. To hear more of the Cut4 staff's weekly banterings about which position player is the best at pitching or how baseball would work in outer space, subscribe to the Cut4Cast by clicking here.
Gemma Kaneko: Are there any Indians hairstyles ... that you've seen that we might not know about because we're not at Spring Training?
Jordan Bastian: So, Danny Salazar's teammates have taken to calling him "Skunk" because he's kind of got this dark-on-the-sides, white-ish, grown-out faux-hawk thing on top of his head. A couple of years ago, he put on the Wild Thing glasses and had the Wild Thing haircut like Major League, and this year he's come back as The Skunk. And he actually walked us through it. He went through a bunch of different styles this winter and settled on this one.

[There's] Lindor, with the curly locks with the blond tips. Francona's jokingly called him a poodle. He looks like a little poodle.

And then when Roberto Pérez went bleached right ahead of the World Baseball Classic, that was pretty jarring when he walked in the room.

So yeah, we're seeing some of that, and it seems to be very prevalent among the Latin-born players. I'm just happy, as a 34-year-old who's going prematurely gray. I just like seeing [that] dyeing your hair gray is coming back. That's cool. My hair is naturally cool now, so that's nice.
Gemma: You're on trend.
Jordan: Right.
Gemma: Are there any other changes we should be aware of? Any beards? Any tattoos? Anything shocking [that] any Indians players are going to have this year?
Jordan: The one that I think's really cool -- I don't know if it's new, I haven't asked if it's new -- but, Mike Clevinger, who Indians Twitter likes to call "The Flow," because he has that deGrom-type hairstyle, showed me a photo of when he was playing Little League (for the Indians, as it actually happened) -- and he had shoulder-length hair back then, too. So he's just always done that. On his left forearm, he has his daughter's name, Penelope, but right above that is an owl. Like a really prominent owl on his forearm, with its yellow eyes.
I don't know if he's hoping hitters are looking at the owl for a moment in his windup for a moment to distract them. But between the owl staring at the batter, and his hair going all over the place, and a very violent delivery motion, that'll be a fun one for fans to look at.

View this post on Instagram

Who?

A post shared by Jordan Bastian (@bastianmlb) on

Gemma: That sounds like a really good way to distract other players. The owls are not what they seem. Just an owl staring at you all the time.
Bastian: Yeah, or when they strike out, they can walk away going, "Hoo was that?"
Kaneko: That should become his catchphrase. I really hope that's what happens.
So now that everyone's back, I'm sure you've been hearing about what everyone has been up to in the offseason. We all kind of know that Trevor Bauer really likes drones and math and helping random kids on the Internet with their homework, which is very sweet. Are there any other weird offseason or off-time hobbies that we don't know about?
Bastian: One that I ran into this spring that I thought was interesting was that Steve Delabar, the relief pitcher, paints cleats in the clubhouse. Before Colabello went to the World Baseball Classic, [Delabar] painted the Italian flag behind the Nike logo on his cleats. He painted the Puerto Rican flag on Roberto Pérez. He's tweaked some of his own cleats. So it's sort of just a hobby he has. He does it for fun. He's not doing it for financial gain or anything. So that was kind of a fun one I ran into this spring.

BarberJordan
beephero
AP_702417634020
NYC