This is day 20 of the “7th Inning Stache”s 100 days of MLB mustaches. All of the Staches will be cataloged in our MLB Mustache Hall Of Fame. If you have any tips on some fielding first basemen follicle follies please email us the tip @ NESWblogs-at-gmail.com.
Today’s special guest inductor is Tyler Maas, renowned Brewers writer for Bugs & Cranks, and noted Wisconsin pizza reviewer at Doctors of Za.
December 12, 1980 is a day that will forever live in moustache lore.
On that fateful day, the St. Louis Cardinals shipped Rollie Fingers and Pete Vuckovich – two of the finest mustachioed men to ever toe a pitching rubber (and Ted Simmons, a man of no discernable facial hair) – to the Milwaukee Brewers in a seven-player deal.
Once in Milwaukee, Fingers and his famed handle bar moustache cemented a place in Cooperstown with a Cy Young- and MVP-winning 1981 season. Vuckovich, the lesser known of the pitchers, and his patchy Fu Manchu won the Cy Young the following season.
“Vuck,” as he’s been called in moustache-related induction pieces, took his prowess on the field and funneled it into method acting after retirement. He portrayed Yankees slugger “Haywood” (a position player with a slightly different-looking moustache) in the 1989 motion picture Major League. But nothing he’d done on the field nor on the silver screen could match what Peter Dennis Vuckovich did on his face. There, a mere flabby, acne-scarred man became a force, a vehicle of intimidation, a legend.
Each day we describe the stache in one word.
Pete Vukovich’s stache = Versatile
