BOSTON -- So there is a report that says Manny Ramirez had four inches cut from his hair, which is essentially no news.

Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf’s appearance standards don’t say that long hair needs to be trimmed. Long hair, much less shaggy hair, isn’t supposed to exist on White Sox players.

So Ramirez is not in compliance.

What are the White Sox doing about that? So far, nothing.

Ramirez is still on the field, so they haven’t taken away his playing time. There is no word on whether he was fined, an issue that players’ union certainly would contest.

So four inches, or 99 millimeters, or whatever it was that was cut really doesn’t make a difference.

In fact, his hair looks exactly the same length as it did when he arrived in Cleveland to join the White Sox.

How can this be? Maybe we can explain.

Somebody seems to have definitely braided Ramirez’s hair over the past 24 hours. And in braiding it, his dreadlocks were straightened ever so slightly giving him a little more length. Say four inches of length. That was the four inches that was trimmed.

So we still have long hair on a White Sox player, and we still have it at basically the same length. It’s a haircut that wasn’t really a haircut.

And was that really 200-plus words all about a man’s hair? Sad but true.