At Least One Team Will Grow on You

Many New York Yankees, the famous ones especially, dress to evoke Madison Avenue. The Boston Red Sox appear to have awakened on it, wrapped in yesterday’s New York Post.

Getting off their bus Monday afternoon, half the Red Sox looked homeless, as if they’d bummed rides from Midtown. One of them had the temerity to get his hair cut over the weekend, and first baseman Kevin Millar has been ripping him for it ever since.

Doug Mientkiewicz has vowed to lose his razor until the end of the American League championship series, to which Millar said, “We don’t clean-shave around here. He comes over here looking pretty, he can go back to Minnesota.”

Trot Nixon is experimenting with some different chin stubble, an effort Millar supported fully.

“He looks like a serial killer,” Millar said, meaning it as a compliment, of course.

Johnny Damon started this whole “bunch of idiots” thing a week back, and the Red Sox have ridden that -- and a lot of sound baseball -- into a best-of-seven series against the Yankees, who’d be excused for looking over the tops of their Wall Street Journals at the spectacle that is Damon & Co.

There is nothing to say the sartorial and attitudinal contrasts between the button-down Yankees and open-collar Red Sox will have a major bearing on a series that begins tonight at Yankee Stadium, but Terry Francona’s boys do seem to be having a good time, and maybe they’ll dirt-bag themselves straight into the World Series.

“We have a bunch of guys that have fun,” said Millar, himself fully tattooed and goateed. “We don’t worry about what we’re supposed to do, what we’re supposed to look like, what we’re supposed to act like.”

So, with the support of owner John W. Henry and General Manager Theo Epstein, and a nod from Francona, the Red Sox show up on time, do their work, play hard and, well, that’s about it. Everything else is left to them, whether to extend the limits of personal grooming or decorate their lockers with bumper stickers from strip clubs or chase each other with buckets of water after Friday’s division series clincher.

Third-base coach Dale Sveum noted recently he’d been around two teams on which there were only good, hard-working players -- the 1998 Yankees, a team that won 125 games and a World Series and for whom he was a utility infielder, and these Red Sox. Those Establishment Yankees and these Free-for-All Red Sox, that’s it, in two decades of baseball, the whole list.

“This is the way we are,” infielder Pokey Reese said. “We’re not going to change because of what people say or think.... It’s all about having fun around here.”

A few of the Yankees, perhaps, would grow paintbrush beards and Elvis sideburns if George Steinbrenner allowed it, which he doesn’t. Driven perhaps by the former football coach in him, Steinbrenner prefers short, neat cuts and fresh faces with his championships. Jason Giambi probably needed two hours in a barber’s chair when he signed with the Yankees three winters ago, and whom do you think was Damon’s inspiration in Oakland? Damon has begun to resemble the protagonist in “The Shining,” which is appropriate, considering Stephen King is co-writing a book on the Red Sox’s season.

But, the guess here is, there aren’t many on the Yankee roster harboring Bob Marley dreams. Think Derek Jeter with cornrows. A-Rod with dreadlocks. Bernie Williams plays jazz, not rock ‘n’ roll.

The gaps in manner and scruff have existed for decades, according to Yankee Manager Joe Torre. But there has rarely been a chance to compare the two this far into October, when the Yankees often are playing and the Red Sox usually are mulling their rebellious sides at home.

“It’s a personality [trait],” Torre said. “They’re pretty much freewheeling. They have always been that way. In my nine years here, they have been the same type of club. You know, to give you another perspective, during my playing days, we would go to Winter Haven [during spring training], it would be the same atmosphere. I don’t think that’s ever changed; that’s what they have been. They have been a very talented group of people.

“As far as the way we do things and the way they do things, when it comes down to winning games, it’s pretty similar. You do have to call on resources that make you want it bad enough, and I think you’ll find two clubs that sort of match up pretty well.”

Jeter said it wouldn’t reflect in the baseball, and, really, there is a very slight difference between suffocating championship expectations, experienced in New York by the Yankees, and relentless championship desperation, lived in Boston by the Red Sox. No number of flip curls would change that.

“Both teams want to win,” Jeter said. “I don’t care what the perception is of both sides.”