With monocle and curly mustache, college baseball player cements himself as photo day legend

Justin Meekins picked up his phone after the Salisbury University baseball team shut out Immaculata on Wednesday and found dozens of text, Snapchat and Instagram messages waiting for him. Almost none of them concerned the senior outfielder’s 1 for 2 day at the plate, which brought his average to .556 in three games this season.

“Everyone was saying that my roster picture was on this site and that site,” Meekins said in a phone interview. “A lot of the alumni were saying how stupid I was.”

Earlier that day, the Twitter account @D3BaseballPod tweeted Meekins’s official team photos from his four-year career at the school on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “The progression of his roster photos from freshman year to now is like the galaxy brain meme but for facial hair and glasses,” read the tweet, which went viral.

There’s nothing remarkable about Meekins’s freshman photo, which features him in a white Salisbury polo shirt and a patchy beard. There was nothing in that image to suggest that Meekins would turn team picture day into an art form over the next three years, with wire-rim glasses, a Rollie Fingers-like handlebar mustache and finally, in his senior portrait taken last week, a plastic monocle.

MLB.com wrote about Meekins’s “evolving look” and suggested he “went through a two-year hipster phase” as a sophomore and junior.

“I don’t think I really went through a hipster phase,” Meekins said this week. “I just grew my hair and beard out.”

As a sophomore, Meekins was waiting in line to have his picture taken and “trying to think of something funny to do” with teammate Ron Villone, the son of the former major league pitcher by the same name. (Villone sported some snazzy facial hair for his own senior photo last year.)

“I put my hair over my face and tried to make the most weird-slash-intimidating-slash-I-don’t-know-what’s-going-on face that I could,” Meekins said of his sophomore portrait, which gives off some serious Marla Hooch in “A League of Their Own” vibes. “That one’s my personal favorite.”

Meekins grew out his mustache before last season, and the upkeep it required came as a surprise.

“Eating soup and ice cream and stuff becomes pretty much an everyday hassle when you have a mustache like that,” he said. “It was kind of a grind.”

His dad suggested curling it, so Meekins went to Walmart and bought some hair gel ahead of picture day.

“I went in the locker room and curled it the best I could,” he said. “I thought I made a pretty normal face, but apparently it wasn’t.”

Meekins knew he had to outdo himself for his senior photo.

“I couldn’t do the same thing over again, because I think that would be boring and I like being different,” he said. “I don’t know where the monocle idea came from. I just thought I should wear a monocle. I bought one on Amazon Prime for like $2."

(This is the part where we’re obliged to remind you that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Also, get your monocles here.)

Meekins said keeping the monocle on his face proved to be a challenge, but he finally got it to stay long enough to look up at the camera.

“I tried to keep as straight a face as I could,” he said. “It’s probably the most normal-looking face of the four photos.”

When Meekins takes the field — sans monocle and curled mustache — he looks a bit like late-career Jayson Werth.

“I get that one a lot,” he said. “I get Forrest Gump running across the country, Jesus. A few years ago for Halloween, I was the caddie from Happy Gilmore.”

Meekins is more than a picture day legend. He’s a three-time all-Capital Athletic Conference first-team selection who hit, .329, .356 and .378 in his first three seasons at Salisbury

“I just do everything I can to have some fun and be a positive mentor for the younger guys,” Meekins, who started his college career at Maryland before opting to transfer closer to his home in Berlin, Md., said of his picture day high jinks. “I wasn’t really expecting [the photos to go viral], but it’s pretty cool. I like that Salisbury’s getting some attention, too. It puts some eyes on our baseball program, shows that we kind of get after it down here.”

The No. 13 Sea Gulls, who have outscored their opponents 42-4 this season and host No. 7 Cortland for a two-game series this weekend, have made 19 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances.

Meekins’s plastic monocle hangs on a corkboard inside the Salisbury baseball team’s locker room. The marketing major, who is on track to graduate this year, says he might keep it if it’s still there at the end of the season.

“I can tell my kids about it,” he joked. “If we win the World Series, I’ll wear the monocle for the rest of my life.”