This story was excerpted from Justice delos Santos' Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

There are so many different means of conveying information when preparing a team for an opponent. Sheets. Tables. Graphs. Film. All serve to infuse a player with knowledge.

Well, Mike Gonzalez has his own tools to infuse his players with confidence. Scissors. Clippers. Razors.

Gonzalez, the Pirates’ interpreter for Spanish-speaking personnel, doubles as the team’s barber. In his estimation, just about everyone, coaches and players alike, has sat down in the chair for a Mike G Special. No matter the length, no matter the style.

The origins of Gonzalez’s days as a barber have an unfortunate inception story.

Gonzalez, then 15, had a baseball tournament the same weekend as his homecoming dance. His regular barber couldn’t squeeze him in, so Gonzalez sought out a last-minute replacement who happened to have an opening. That barber may have had an opening for a reason.

The haircut -- Gonzalez used to get a blowout -- itself wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though Gonzalez did admit that the barber took his taper a little too high. What really messed up Gonzalez’s confidence was the barber’s pure inability to use a straightedge blade.

“He just didn’t know how to use the blade,” Gonzalez said. “My homecoming pictures, I just have gashes on my face. It was bad. The blowout was taken up a little high, too, more than what I wanted cut off. A special day like homecoming where you’re going to take a lot of pictures, and you have lines of cuts all over your cheeks and on top of your mustache. It was just bad.”

It was so bad, in fact, that it pushed a teenaged Gonzalez to learn how to cut hair himself. Little by little, Gonzalez taught himself the fundamentals. His friends started asking him for cuts. He started getting better.

When Gonzalez was 17 years old, he began working at a shop in Tampa called “Tijerazo” with some “OG Cubans” who taught him scissor work. During his college days, Gonzalez used the craft as a means of making extra income. After college, he acquired his barber license.

“I just got good with it,” Gonzalez said. “I got nasty with it.”

He didn’t initially tell anyone that he was nasty with the blades when he first arrived in Pittsburgh, but it didn’t take much time for word to get out.

“They would always compliment my son for his hair cuts,” Gonzalez said. “One day, they were like, ‘Justus, who cuts your hair?’ He said, ‘Oh, my dad.’ They both looked at me like, ‘Mike, you cut hair and we’re over here flying in a barber?’ Ever since then, I’ve been cutting all the guys up.”

So, next time you see a Pirates player with a fresh fade or crisp lineup, you know who cut it.