(Photo: Andrew Theodorakis)

If it seemed like the Mets’ bandwagon grew this year during their improbable run to the World Series, you might want to blame the romance-novel-cover hair of two of the team’s starting pitchers. The haircuts � or lack thereof � of Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom garnered them almost as much attention as their unbelievable fastballs. Syndergaard’s Nordic-�looking flaxen locks earned him the nickname Thor, and the wild chestnut waves of deGrom belied the calm soul within, a soul transformed into a pitching machine each game by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s �Simple Man.� DeGrom’s hair became such a symbol among fans that Mr. Met himself was spotted at one game sporting a long brown wig. Did you know deGrom’s sister Jessica, an ex-hairdresser, cuts his every year before spring training? Did you know Syndergaard, now tall and muscular, once had the body of a doughy teen, with a dorky haircut to match? Like ice cream in a plastic Mets baseball cap, Mets fans gobbled these anecdotes up, and at times it even seemed as if the source of the Mets’ power were buried in those manes, deGrom and Syndergaard our modern-day Samsons.

When the pain of the World Series loss had dulled slightly, I reached out to the pitchers’ agent (they share one) to see if I could ask them a few important questions: What products do they use? How do they fight hat head? But the boys passed, tired of talking about their manes. Simply having beautiful hair had opened them up to a host of questions about their appearance that baseball players are not used to fielding. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to be the best at what you do and have reporters ask you questions about your appearance? As a woman, I cannot.