DeLaWho? DeLaWhat? DeLaWhere?

This story, which chronicles how the Boston Red Sox have assembled a team of pine-tar nuts, is taken from Page 2 of ESPN.com.

Whatever happens in the World Series, everyone knows the Red Sox are the unquestioned kings of baseball this year when it comes to flamboyant hair styles. Look a bit closer at the players' heads, however, and you'll see that the Sox also lead the league in a more esoteric category.

Uni Watch is referring, of course, to players who smear pine tar all over their batting helmets. The Sox feature several charter members of this club, led by Manny Ramirez, who often spreads the gunk so thick that you can barely see his helmet logo. Other Bosox pine barons include Trot Nixon and Kevin Millar. And just to corner the market, the Sox made mid-season trades this year for longtime helmet-smudgers Orlando Cabrera (whose pine tar acumen had been honed with the Expos) and Doug Mientkiewicz (whose tar-smeared habits go back to his days with the Twins and the 2000 Olympic baseball team).

It isn't clear who started the tar trend, although the first such player Uni Watch recalls seeing was Craig Biggio, back in the 1990s. In any case, the idea is to turn the helmet into a surrogate pine tar rag, so the player can simply touch his helmet during an at-bat to access the sticky stuff. (Note that several of the pine partisans, including Mientkiewicz, Jorge Posada, and Vlad Guerrero, are also among the small contingent of big league hitters who don't wear batting gloves.) This essentialy makes the pine tar crew the spiritual heirs of NFL legends Lester Hayes and Fred Biletnikoff, who were notorious for slathering themselves with so much adhesive goo that they essentially were walking stickum factories.

Although the Sox get the nod as Team Tar, Uni Watch's vote for MVP (that's Most Voluminous Pine) goes to Guerrero, who clearly has baseball's skankiest helmet. Players who stand next to him look shiny and fresh by comparison, as his former and current teammates have discovered. So thick is the tar cloud perched above his head, even his happy moods seem to beg the question, "Why is this man smiling?"

Helmet customization, incidentally, is nothing new. Back in 1963, Earl Battey of the Twins created the first makeshift earflap by attaching a metal plate to the side of his batting helmet. Brooks Robinson insisted on wearing a mere stub of a visor (he had problems with glare from the underside of the full-size brim), and Carl Yastrzemski preferred an oversized earhole.

But none of those alterations did anything to obscure the helmet logo. That's a no-no, which is why there was some chatter this summer that Major League Baseball might fine some of the more heavily-tar-encrusted Red Sox players. Nobody would comment about that on the record (as you can well imagine with such an explosive issue, the pine tar situation is very hush-hush), but don't be surprised if the MLB honchos enforce a stricter policy next season.