For baseball players and their barbers, loyalty cuts both ways
Hair care part of players’ routines
MIAMI — Juice thumbed through his iPhone to find a photo Bryce Harper had sent him: a young man in a barber’s chair, showing off a meticulously detailed haircut from a side angle. The Washington Nationals superstar asked the bearded and heavily tattooed man whether he could replicate the look — an undercut-style cut with a spin on the traditional fade.
“I was like, ‘Oh, Lord,’ ” Juice said. “We pulled it off, though. We did good. It looks better than the picture. That [cut] was weird.”
Harper reached out about a week before the Nationals rolled through Miami for a series last month, then made the short walk that Saturday to Headz Up Barbershop — the only licensed and insured barbershop inside a major league ballpark — located on the field level of Marlins Park between the home and visiting clubhouses.
Nationals manager Dave Martinez occupied the barber’s chair later that day while a couple of Marlins players waited their turns. Juan Soto and Max Scherzer got haircuts, too. And those were only the ones Juice posted on his Instagram account for his 36,000 followers to see. He estimated he gave about 50 haircuts between the clubs over the four-game set. His days, as always, were jam-packed.
“Juice is the best in the business,” Martinez said of the man at the forefront of baseball’s exploding barber circuit.
In the past, players squeezed barbershop visits into busy days, often entrusting unfamiliar barbers on the road, if they had time at all. Today, in response to players’ increased demand for clean and trendy looks, most organizations have barbers on hand for players’ convenience — if guys aren’t Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez has his hair cut in an auxiliary locker room at Nationals Park. Hugo “Juice” Tandron began cutting hair for players in the Marlins’ 1993 season. already arranging travel plans for their trusted barbers to meet them.
In New York, Jordan Lopez bounces between Yankee Stadium and Citi Field when players aren’t visiting his shop in the Bronx. There’s a barber in St. Petersburg, Fla., at Tropicana Field and another in Houston at Minute Maid Park. In Washington, Henry Garcia works at Nationals Park a few days each homestand when he’s not cutting at Melissa’s Beauty Salon on 14th Street NW.
Barbers have become staples in professional baseball’s culture. They are pseudotherapists. They can become confidants. If nothing else, they provide a service some players rely on before they perform in front of thousands every day.
“Getting a haircut is like buying new clothes, new shoes,” Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez said. “You feel relaxed. You feel like it’s a boost. It’s an energy boost. It’s a confidence builder.”
Juice’s real name is Hugo Tandron, and Hugo sounds like the Spanish word for juice — jugo. The son of Cuban immigrants, the 48year-old learned to cut hair 35 years ago by practicing on his own. His mother was a beautician, and he would take her clippers to mimic the haircuts he saw growing up in the Carol City neighborhood of Miami Gardens, Fla.
“She always wanted to give me the little good boy haircut, and I wasn’t having that,” Juice said, his teal throwback Marlins cap matching his teal throwback Marlins gym shorts and covering his bald head. “I wanted to get the cool haircut like the O.G. [Original Gangster] in the neighborhood.”
In 1993, after a couple of brushes with the law, Juice began cutting Gary Sheffield’s hair during the expansion Marlins’ inaugural season. Word quickly spread. Juice’s big league clientele grew so large over the years that the Marlins invited him to set up at the ballpark in 1998.
Two decades later — after four ownership groups, three fire sales, two ballparks and a World Series title — Juice is still around, spending all 81 home dates in his windowless barbershop next to the diamond club.